Tim Stevens

Delivering Caliban

One

Amsterdam,

Sunday 19 May, 9.45 am

The woman in the beret looked back over her shoulder and John Purkiss registered two things simultaneously.

She was blonde and attractive.

And she was his dead fiancée.

He felt the familiar surge in his chest propelling him forwards, as though he was connected physically with her and needed to be in direct contact with her. Countering this was a voice that screamed in his mind, told him to get a grip.

Purkiss stepped on to the road and wove between the trams and the clangour of the bicycle bells. Amsterdam was a gentle bustle of primitive transport around him, seeming to wash around him like a stream around a rock. He disregarded it, eyes fixed on the woman who had turned away again and was striding with purpose in the direction of the Central Station. Claire wore a mauve beret perched at an angle above her short fair hair, a suede coat tight across her shoulders. He didn’t recognise the clothes, but the gait was hers, there was no question about that: taut, fast, sexy.

The voice in his mind jabbered at him, its words beyond his hearing.

Overhead the iron cast of the sky threatened rain. The Dutch spring morning was as ambiguous as they ever were. Purkiss watched Claire pass a stall where among the usual Amsterdam tourist tat — motifs of tulips and cannabis leaves, Van Gogh and Rembrandt prints — sat a number of incongruous Roman Catholic items. A particularly kitsch row of tea towels portrayed the crucifixion, the Vatican, the Pope with hands clasped.

The Pope…

The voice broke through into his consciousness. Purkiss lurched to one side out of the path of a blaring taxi, spun to view the road he’d just crossed. He pivoted on his heel, scanning the environment in a sweeping motion that took in the spread of the city south of the station.

Damn it. He’d lost him.

As if the thought had somehow sharpened his vision he picked out the tiniest shape in the distance, heading straight for the station’s grand and massive concourse. The head was bowed, the gait almost a sprint.

It was Pope.

Purkiss broke into a run.

*

The man seemed to sense him approaching at the last minute and turned his shoulder a fraction. For an instant Purkiss thought he’d be someone else, another illusion like the one of Claire that had taken him in a few moments ago. But there was no doubt this was Pope, even in the brief glimpse Purkiss caught of his profile. The thin, prominent nose, the high cheekbones that marked him out even in this city of young and good-looking people, the hint of a grey eye not quite catching Purkiss’s: all were unmistakable.

Purkiss was a tall man, two inches or so above Pope’s height. He had the advantage of momentum; Pope had been slowing when he’d noticed Purkiss bearing down. But he couldn’t simply drop Pope by diving on him or aiming a blow at the back of his neck. It was broad daylight outside the largest train station in the largest city in the Netherlands.

Purkiss would have to get close enough to take the man down unobtrusively.

Pope seemed to sense this and turned fully to face Purkiss, adopting the stance of someone preparing for combat: slightly bent knees, head lowered, arms raised at waist height. He stood at the centre of one of the entrances to the station concourse and people bustled past him, occasionally barging him. His eyes were locked on Purkiss’s. Purkiss assumed Pope would want to avoid drawing attention to them just as much as he himself did.

Pope’s hand moved inside his leather jacket as Purkiss closed the final few metres between them, and emerged flashing.

Purkiss stepped aside at the last minute as the blade flashed in an arc across his abdomen, the point catching the edge of his own linen coat; even in the noise of the crowd he heard fabric tear. Pope was right-handed but had swept the blade in a counter-instinctive forehand gesture so that at the end of the movement his arm was across his body, protecting it. Purkiss grabbed for his wrist and caught it and pulled it on, continuing the movement. Pope had been anticipating this and wrenched his arm back, failing to free himself from Purkiss’s grip but keeping his balance.

With a sharp twist of Pope’s wrist Purkiss popped the knife out of his hand and heard it clatter to the pavement even as Pope’s free hand came jabbing at his midsection. Pope’s stiffened fingers caught him beneath the sternum and even though Purkiss managed to tense his abdominal muscles in time the pain was immense, as though a skewer had been rammed into his belly. He bent forward involuntarily which was a mistake because Pope’s forehead connected with his cheekbone.

Light and agony exploded in Purkiss’s head. Dimly he was aware that he’d let go of Pope’s wrist. Blinded by nausea he closed up with his arms, covering himself in anticipation of the next blow, but in an instant he realised Pope hadn’t pressed home his advantage but had instead chosen to run.

Purkiss plunged into the teeming, tilting surge of the crowd ahead of him, shoving people aside crudely, feeling as though he were wading through sludge. He kept sight of Pope’s head, maddeningly close yet separated from him by bodies that were starting to turn and react to him with surprise and outrage. He broke through the mass, sending suitcases spinning. Pope was sprinting down the concourse to the right, all attempts at unobtrusiveness abandoned.

The yelling behind Purkiss echoed off the great arched ceiling as he gave chase. Pope was heading along a platform towards the semicircle of daylight at the end of the station, veering close to the edge. Two uniformed, shouting men — station personnel, or police — hove into Purkiss’s field of vision and he dodged them smartly. Pope was nearly at the concrete barrier blocking the way between the end of the station concourse and what was presumably some sort of freight platform on the outside. A burly man, another member of staff, had planted himself at the barrier in Pope’s way.

Purkiss didn’t see exactly what happened next but as he reached the barrier himself he saw the large man sprawled on the platform, hands clasped at his throat, a high-pitched gargling piping from his mouth. There was blood, too, a lot of it. Purkiss vaulted the barrier without breaking his stride. Pope had got across it even more quickly and was well along the platform outside.

It was as Purkiss had guessed a loading area for freight. Personnel in orange jackets were clustered in a group, staring in astonishment, one or two stepping towards Pope with their hands raised in warning. None of them made a grab at him. By the time Purkiss passed them they had got over their initial bewilderment and looked more willing to confront this second interloper. Something in Purkiss’s face seemed to discourage them.

A train was at rest on the track to the left. Purkiss watched Pope draw level with the last carriage ahead, then hesitate, looking back. Pope leaped from the edge of the platform, disappearing behind the train.

Purkiss reached the end of the train. Four tracks ran in parallel, and Pope was on the island between the middle two tracks, sprinting again in the same direction as before. Instead of crossing behind the stationary train and following Pope, Purkiss continued running along the platform, parallel now to the other man. Ahead, the outer two tracks merged into one so that Purkiss and Pope were now separated by a single track.

Even as he ran, Purkiss knew the other man had the edge: in stamina and in speed. Not an enormous advantage, but enough to make a difference. Pope was pulling ahead so that they were no longer level.

When you’ve lost one advantage, create another.

Scattered on the platform ahead of Purkiss was an assortment of bits of metal. He spotted what he wanted while he was still running, so the delay when he reached the pile was minimal. Slowing only a fraction he ducked and grasped a wheel of some sort, orange with rust, the size of a dinner plate. It had a good heft as he swung it up, enough to give it the momentum needed.

Purkiss put a last burst of effort into his running, nothing sustainable but enough to bring him back level with Pope. For an instant Pope glanced across the track at him. Purkiss slowed a touch and gripped the wheel like a discus in his left hand and, more awkwardly than he’d have liked because he was using his non-dominant arm, sent the circular block of steel arcing across the track.

For a moment he thought he’d got the trajectory wrong, but his move evidently surprised Pope and broke his stride and that brought him directly into the path of the wheel. It caught him in the side of the head with a solid noise Purkiss could hear on the other side of the track. Pope dropped, thrown off his feet.

Purkiss leaped off the platform, his shoes meeting gravel, fear thrilling him as for an instant he was sure he was going to touch the rails. He picked his way between the metal bars and sprang up on to the other side, seeing Pope stagger to his feet and reel about, disorientated.

Purkiss was at him in two strides, grabbing his shoulders and spinning him round and swinging a punch that would have floored Pope if the younger man hadn’t snapped his head to one side at the last instant and driven a kick into Purkiss’s abdomen, knocking him back. As Purkiss stumbled Pope seized his right arm and rolled on his back, legs drawn up. Purkiss felt himself lifted, pulled along by his arm and across the fulcrum Pope had created with his own balled-up body. The edge of the platform loomed large. Purkiss shot out his left arm and broke his fall awkwardly, his face slamming against the edge.

He felt Pope twist his right arm up between his shoulderblades and force his knee into the small of Purkiss’s back. Purkiss’s neck was twisted so that he was staring down the track to his right, his head hanging over the edge of the platform.

A train was approaching the station, curving down the track towards him, the rumble of its wheels and the screech of its braking mechanism amplified through the concrete pressed against Purkiss’s left ear.

It wasn’t going to manage to stop in time.

Behind him Purkiss felt Pope twist his arm higher and drive his knee deeper into his back, inching Purkiss forward so that his head protruded further over the lip of the platform.

The brakes of the train were screaming now. Through the expanding front window the driver’s mouth stretched silently.

Blindly, Purkiss seized the lip of the platform with his free left hand, ignoring the blaze of pain in his right shoulder where it felt his arm was being wrenched free from the socket. With his hand anchored and using his left elbow as a pivot, he turned slightly on to his left side and heaved.

Pope toppled forward over Purkiss, releasing his arm to flail reflexively with his hands. As the nose of the train hurtled into the station and Purkiss hauled himself back, he saw Pope drop on to the track feet first, between the live rails, and turn his landing into the first movement of a springing action that shot him up to grab on to the opposite platform. He was pulling his feet clear when the length of the train juddered past, hiding him from Purkiss.

Purkiss was up on his feet, running through the pain that burned his shoulder and his face and his belly, back down the length of the train. He reached the end and, heart hammering, stared across at the opposite platform, scanning its length.

Pope was gone.

Two

Purkiss cranked the window as much to bathe his head in the cool spring afternoon air as to disperse the nicotine fug. Beside him Vale’s hand on the wheel held a smouldering dog-end between the index and middle fingers.

He was aware Vale was looking across at him but he stared straight ahead. Images coalesced and dispersed, a surreal kaleidoscope: garish neon above as yet curtained windows in the Walletjes, laughing stoned faces, and everywhere the bicycles, looking in many cases too rickety to be roadworthy.

Vale said, not for the first time: ‘Are you operational?’

Purkiss didn’t answer; once was enough. He’d rung once his fingers were steady enough to dial. He could have made his way back to the temporary base Vale had set up but he’d decided to conserve some energy.

A last burst of speed had taken him away from the station, not this time in pursuit of Pope but out of the reach of whatever authorities were massing and descending on the scene of the fight. Once he’d cleared the canal to the south and lost himself among the shopping arcades he’d slumped against a wall and rung the number. He’d been mildly surprised that Vale had arrived in the car on his own.

‘How is he?’ Vale meant Pope.

‘In better shape than I am.’ He’d caught Pope hard on the side of the head with the rusty chunk of metal he’d thrown, but up close it didn’t look as if there was any serious damage. ‘Fit enough to be far away by now, and have left no trace.’

‘We’ve been over the flat.’ Now he turned to look at Vale. ‘Bit of a mess, as you said.’

Vale was a rarity, if not unique: a black man in his sixties who’d held a senior position in the British intelligence establishment. Nowadays there were plenty of younger people from minority ethnic backgrounds. Vale on the other hand was a veteran of over three decades’ standing. He looked older than his years, hunched over the wheel, the cowl of his oversized coat like the rim of a tortoise’s shell across his neck. His face was seamed from years of tension and tobacco.

Purkiss had rung Vale’s number the first time after Pope had fled the flat, not saying anything except: ‘He’s done it. I’m after him.’ He’d trusted the older man to scour the flat and seal it, which he’d done. The police would need to find it eventually.

So would the CIA. They’d probably get there first.

‘Three shots.’ Vale made it a statement, one that sounded obvious, except that Purkiss knew he was fishing for further impressions.

Purkiss said: ‘Nine millimetre. A Glock, possibly. I didn’t get a good look. I made him drop it. That’s when he made a run for it.’

There had indeed been three shots, a double tap to the head after an initial belly hit to bring Jablonsky down. There was a significance in that sequence which danced on the periphery of Purkiss’s thoughts. He left it for the time being.

Something else was clamouring for his attention. When he focused on it, it became a klaxon exploding in his head.

‘You have to warn Taylor.’

‘Too late.’ Vale was staring ahead now, navigating knots of tourists spilling across the road. ‘We went to his flat as soon as we got your call. Same method. Probably the same weapon.’

*

Purkiss had arrived at Schiphol Airport at six that morning. It always seemed to him faintly absurd to fly to Amsterdam when the total time in the air was usually less than that spent journeying to one of London’s airports and checking in; but Vale had ensured he was fast-tracked through the boarding process.

Vale’s call had come at midnight.

‘I need you in Amsterdam.’

Purkiss had been reading in his study at the time. ‘Where are you?’

‘On my way there from Paris.’

Purkiss closed his book and sat up, alert.

Vale went on: ‘I’ve booked the five a.m. London City flight. Meet you this side.’

‘I’ll be there.’ Purkiss was already striding to pack. ‘Anything you can give me at this point?’

‘It involves the Cousins.’

The Cousins were the Americans, specifically the CIA. The Company, in the organisation’s own parlance. Purkiss didn’t press for more; there was a limit to the information that could be safely conveyed over the phone.

The KLM flight had touched down in a cool red dawn. Schiphol, a major hub, was already bustling. Vale was easy to spot, standing by himself in the arrivals hall, stooped and impassive but inwardly itching for a cigarette, Purkiss knew. A nod was the only greeting they exchanged.

Purkiss had known Vale a little under five years, since shortly before Purkiss had quit the Service. Indeed, Vale had been instrumental in persuading Purkiss to leave and work for him. Their relationship had changed six months ago when Purkiss had discovered that Vale had lied to him: about Purkiss’s dead fiancée, Claire, and about the man who’d killed her. They’d continued to work together, and Purkiss continued to respect the older man’s professionalism and commitment. He had to admit that he even liked Vale, sometimes.

But he no longer fully trusted him.

When they reached what Purkiss had assumed would be Vale’s rental car, Purkiss was surprised to see another man behind the wheel, somebody he didn’t recognise. Forties, thin and balding, with wire-rimmed glasses. Purkiss slid in behind him, Vale taking the front passenger seat.

‘John Purkiss, Kevin Gifford,’ said Vale. The man, Gifford, reached back awkwardly to proffer his hand. Purkiss shook it.

‘Mr Gifford is head of the Service’s local station here.’

It struck Purkiss how long he’d been away. There’d been a time when he knew the names of all the Service station heads in western Europe. He said nothing, sat back waiting as Gifford steered the car out into the daylight. Purkiss assumed the man had waited in the car in case he was too conspicuous in the arrivals hall. Which meant he and Vale were wary of surveillance. The CIA?

They drove in silence until the car reached the motorway leading into the city. Gifford glanced across at Vale, and Vale produced a small digital recorder from his pocket, held it up and thumbed the play button.

Two male voices, one louder than the other, were in conversation. The accents were US. Purkiss thought the louder one sounded New York, possibly Jersey. Bursts of distortion interrupted the speech periodically.

‘Got an ID on this Brit guy. You’re not going to believe it.’

‘Who?’

‘Darius Pope.’

A pause, then an explosion of static, and: ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You mean, like — ’

‘Exactly, Yeah.’

Static again.

‘Ah, shit. Ah, god damn it.’

‘He’s based here, in the city. He’s an agent.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No. Right under our noses.’

‘He’s an agent?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Six?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus — ’

‘Here’s what we do.’

‘We’ve got to tell the chief.’

‘Not yet.’ More static. ‘- check him out. Follow him see what he does. Catch him in something so we can be hundred per cent sure. Or as near as damn it, anyhow.’

This was followed by five seconds’ worth of white noise. The New Yorker’s voice came back, patchily.

‘- surveillance detail, but it’s the best I can do at short notice… turn him in.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Got to go.’

A click. Vale thumbed off the recording.

From the driver’s seat Gifford’s voice was a dry rasp, as though he was in the habit of shouting a lot. ‘That was, as you’ll have gathered, a recording of a mobile phone conversation. One or other of the parties was driving at the time, hence the disruption to the signal. The man with the more distinct voice, the one whose phone was being tapped, is called Andrew Jablonsky. The other one’s Gregory Taylor. Both are Company operatives based here in Amsterdam. The recording was made at around nine yesterday evening.’

Gifford paused to ease into the correct lane for the off-ramp. Purkiss didn’t ask the obvious question because he knew the answer was coming anyway.

‘Darius Pope is one of ours, a Service operative at my station. Recently moved here, four months ago. Backup and odd-job work, for the moment.’

‘A rookie?’ said Purkiss.

‘No. An experienced field agent, if undistinguished. Solid. Did two years in Hamburg before the transfer.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘We’ve no idea.’ Gifford’s voice had taken on an edge, as if to say: that’s your job to find out. ‘But Jablonsky and Taylor clearly know him, and want to keep him under surveillance. They talk about obtaining proof of something, and possibly turning him in.’

Purkiss understood why he and Vale had been called. For over four years their remit had been to investigate suspected and confirmed rogue elements within British Intelligence, and to deal with them without public fuss as far as that was possible. Set traps for the rats, and spring them.

Claire. Her face rose without warning in Purkiss’s mind’s eye. He clenched his teeth, stared out the window at the bright morning.

Now it appeared the Americans, the Company, might themselves have discovered something illicit about a Service agent.

Vale was watching him in the mirror. As if reading his thoughts he said: ‘We need to deal with this ourselves. Exposure of one of ours by the Cousins would be an enormous embarrassment. God knows there’s enough one-upmanship already.’

To Gifford, Purkiss said: ‘Have you set up surveillance on Pope yourselves?’

‘That’s the problem.’ This time it was Gifford’s eyes he saw in the glass. ‘Pope’s disappeared.’

Three

Instead of taking Purkiss and Vale to the Service headquarters, Gifford had set up a temporary base in a suite on the fourth floor of a nondescript chain hotel south of the Leidseplein. Purkiss didn’t ask, but assumed his technical status as an outsider meant that he had to be kept away from the ‘official’ Service HQ, which was itself unofficial as its personnel were operating without Embassy protection.

On the way to the hotel, Purkiss asked, ‘Why did you have this Jablonsky under surveillance?’

‘Routine.’ Gifford sounded surprised. ‘We always have the Cousins tapped. It helps to rotate the targets from time to time, makes it less likely we’ll be discovered.’

‘Presumably they do the same to you.’

Gifford gave a tight laugh. ‘They try. We catch them at it. We’re too good. Had years of practice before they got in on the game.’

Or perhaps that was what the Company wanted Gifford and the rest of the Service to think, thought Purkiss.

In the suite’s living room Gifford seated them before a portable screen on which was amplified the display from a laptop.

‘Darius Pope. Born fourth of February, 1981. Grammar school boy in Aylesbury, Bucks — bit of a rebel, came close to expulsion — then political science at Bristol. Bright, but not dazzling. Joined the Service September 2005. Here’s the thing. His father was Geoffrey Pope, a Service veteran. Master interrogator… you might have read some of his writings on the subject?’

Purkiss hadn’t.

Gifford went on: ‘All our intel indicates the teenaged Darius hated the old man. Geoffrey was killed in a flying accident when the boy was 17. So perhaps Darius joined the Service to prove a point to his late dad.’

The rest of Pope’s story was, as Gifford had said earlier, undistinguished. He’d built up a decent reputation as an intel gatherer and later as a patterns analyst. Good looking and with obvious self assurance, he’d been rather too obtrusive for undercover work. His transfer to Amsterdam from Hamburg had been based on nothing more than a personal request, as he said he felt he wanted a change of scene.

There were no recorded instances of disciplinary action against him, nor any suggestions of infractions that might have been quietly swept under the carpet. He was to all appearances clean. A model agent.

‘I ordered surveillance on his flat starting ten p.m. last night,’ said Gifford. ‘He wasn’t there. He hasn’t returned home since. And he hasn’t contacted anyone in the office, nor has he answered his phone. His phone location isn’t traceable, either, which means he’s probably ditched it. Or someone else has.’

*

Pope lived alone in a rented apartment on Vijzelgracht. Purkiss caught a tram to within a couple of streets away and covered the rest of the distance on foot, the cobbles on the road still slick with dew. Gifford had rung ahead to call off the surveillance on the apartment until further notice, so Purkiss had free rein.

Like many agents, Pope appeared to be remarkably lax about personal security. This, Purkiss knew, was because an agent was aware that anybody breaking into his home would be a professional and wouldn’t be deterred by the usual measures a homeowner might adopt, such as a gated entry system, triple locks and the like. Purkiss entered the narrow atrium through unlocked doors, climbed to the second floor and, although Pope’s door was locked with both a yale and a mortice mechanism, was able to bypass both within a minute.

He took the usual precautions, wary of a booby trap; but there was none. A swift reconnoitre of the apartment revealed a modest if not spartan bachelor’s abode, with few creature comforts. Briefly Purkiss remembered a similar flat, six months earlier on the Baltic coast. There, he’d found evidence of Claire’s killer. This time there was nothing of significance. He opened the laptop computer he found in a desk drawer but its password protection deterred him Gifford and his people could have a crack at it later.

Purkiss pulled out his phone and called Vale.

‘No sign of him. By the look of it, he’s been here in the last twenty-four hours. There’s some moisture in the kitchen sink and the bathroom.’

Vale pondered for a moment. ‘All right. Leave everything as it is.’

‘I want to pay a visit to these Americans. Jablonsky and Taylor.’

‘One moment.’ Vale’s voice became muffled. He came back: ‘Gifford agrees. We have their home addresses.’

It was a Sunday, so they might be at home. Purkiss rang off and exited the flat. He used his phone to locate the first apartment, Jablonsky’s, in relation to Pope’s. Twenty minutes’ walk away across the city centre. Jablonsky too lived alone, apparently. Purkiss had no fixed idea about how he would approach the man, or even if he would at all. Covert pursuit might be more productive.

Jablonsky lived down a cul de sac in a nondescript rim of residences off the shopping district. Purkiss’s antennae, which normally alerted him to surveillance, were silent.

The four-storey building housing Jablonsky’s flat loomed before him, crushed between two squatter structures. Purkiss peered up at the windows, trying to make out whether the curtains were drawn or whether the darkness was caused by shadow on the glass.

The shot came, muffled and dull, but unmistakeable to someone like Purkiss who’d heard his share of silenced gunfire.

Purkiss found the entrance unlocked and took the stairs three at a time, ears straining for clues. Another shot came as he reached the landing at the top, a third so close to the second they sounded like a pair of heartbeats. The door to Jablonsky’s flat was closed. Purkiss hesitated for a second, ear against the thick wood, then tried the handle as slowly as he dared. The door yielded quietly and he pushed it open and stepped through.

From where he stood a kitchenette was visible at a slant past a central pillar in the living room. A man’s back presented itself to him through the entrance to the kitchenette. Either his foot disturbed a loose floorboard or the man had an agent’s finely tuned sense of an opponent’s presence, but the man turned and ducked so swiftly that even if Purkiss had been armed he doubted he’d have been able to fire accurately.

The man had a gun, clearly, so Purkiss used his environment as cover, the chief component of which was the supporting pillar in the living room. In two steps he was up against one side, pressed hard against the stone. He darted a glance around the side and saw the man, shockingly close, a head of fair hair above a youthful face.

Pope, there was no doubt about it.

Purkiss leaped around the pillar to flank the man but Pope was anticipating this and bringing the gun up. Purkiss used a knife hand against the younger man’s wrist, driving the forearm against the edge of the pillar and sending the pistol spinning from his splayed fingers.

Pope reacted rapidly, clearly calculating that the loss of the gun had lengthened the odds against him, and ran for the door. Purkiss’s attention snagged on what he saw through the entrance arch to the kitchenette: a short, middle-aged man slumped on the floor against the refrigerator, a crimson bloom across his chest. Purkiss stepped in the direction of the kitchenette on the off-chance Jablonsky was still alive, and saw at once the state of the man’s head, one side completely blasted away. That would have been the double tap, which meant the first shot he’d heard from outside had caused the chest wound.

He took off through the door of the flat after Pope, spotting him rounding the corner as Purkiss himself made it outside, and pursuing him towards the Central Station.

*

An hour later, after the encounter at the station and as Vale pulled the car into the parking lot outside the hotel where Gifford had created the makeshift base, Purkiss said, ‘I assume Gifford’s checked out the rest of the Company’s agents here.’

‘In case any of them is the next target. Yes, indeed.’ Vale shrugged. ‘We don’t even know what we’re looking for. Why Jablonsky and Taylor were hit.’

‘You’ve got Pope’s laptop?’

‘Yes. Gifford’s people are taking it apart now.’

Purkiss pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. ‘Do the Company know yet?’

‘About the deaths? Hard to tell, but there’s been no sign so far.’

Up in the suite Gifford was pacing, a fist pressed under his chin. Otherwise his face betrayed no trace of stress. He gave Purkiss a quick appraisal as they entered, seemed satisfied.

Purkiss went over to the window and stared out, trying to keep his frustration under wraps. Amsterdam provided access to the whole of Europe, and its borders weren’t exactly secure. Pope could be out of the country by now. The airport would be monitored but it was unlikely he’d try leaving that way.

*

Two hours later, at a few minutes after noon, Gifford took a call. He listened mostly, muttered a few words, then turned to Purkiss and Vale.

‘They’ve cracked the laptop. No files of interest, so far. But the internet search history shows that yesterday Pope was looking at flight times from Schiphol to Hamburg.’

Purkiss stood. ‘I’m on it.’

Four

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 12.25 pm

A sensation of warmth on the back of Nina Ramirez’s neck was the first sign that someone was watching her.

They’d finished their first rehearsal in the Old Cabell Hall where they’d be performing in public in a fortnight, and it hadn’t gone well. Madison, the second violinist, had played sluggishly, and the rest of them had fallen into step. They made it through the Bartok piece, the third quartet, after which Ruth, their conductor, got up and strode towards them, hands buried in her huge hair.

‘Guys. Enough, already.’

She bawled them out in her usual mild way, exasperated rather than furious. They agreed that they’d call it a day rather than dig themselves in deeper, but would schedule an extra rehearsal to make up for it. Dispirited, they packed up their instruments and decided not to go for a coffee, since all they’d do would be mope about their crappy performance.

Nina decided to take a stroll around the university grounds, something she liked to do whatever mood she was in. Three years ago she’d graduated, but although she had no postgraduate connection with the University of Virginia she loved it like a home: its carefully preserved beauty, the way that everywhere you went you sensed the history that had soaked into the very walls and boulevards.

She’d passed the Rotunda when the heat flared at the back of her neck.

Nina had learned not to turn suddenly when that happened. Whoever was watching would be gone and she’d feel — and look — foolish. The trick was to pretend nothing was amiss, then try to catch the watcher out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes they were still there when you looked, just for an instant. Usually they weren’t.

As nonchalantly as she could, Nina shrugged her shoulder as though hefting the violin case slung across it, turning her head slightly as she did so. Her glance took in the Rotunda. Students milled in small groups on the steps, but there was nobody looking in her direction. Nobody doing so overtly, anyhow.

Heart hammering, her mouth like ash, she turned her back deliberately on the building and set off across the lawn, passing Jefferson’s statue with its blank stare.

*

Nina had formed the string quartet shortly after graduation, together with two other alumni and Joe, their cellist, who was older. Ruth, their manager, was a former tutor of Nina’s and still taught at the university. She was as supportive of Nina as ever, while making it quite plain that she believed her former pupil was destined for greater things than a small-town quartet and needed to stretch herself a bit.

Then again, Ruth didn’t know everything about Nina.

Since graduating Nina had lived in the same tiny rented apartment downtown. She’d had offers from potential flatmates, and would have been able to afford a bigger place had she chosen to share, but she preferred to be on her own, needed her own space. Her grandmother, with whom she’d lived here in Charlottesville since she was eleven, had died a week after Nina’s graduation ceremony. It was as if she’d hung on until her granddaughter had reached the point where she could fend for herself.

Her grandmother had left her enough to live modestly but comfortably for ten years, and now Nina had a small but growing income from the quartet, which was getting highly favourable notices in the Charlottesville press. Enough money to be content with, a place to call home, a small but close circle of friends, her music, and her violin. Nina would, if asked, have said truthfully that she was happy.

Her pulse had slowed by the time she was halfway across the lawn, and she decided to meander down the pavilions and enjoy the ingenuity of their serpentine walls. It was almost lunchtime and students were starting to spill out of classrooms and congregate in couples and groups. They looked, for the most part, scarily young.

Twenty-six, girl, and they see you as old.

Overhead the sky was a flawless expanse of cornflower. The air held the merest bite of coolness, something that would disappear for good in the coming weeks as the spring heat settled in. The sinuous walls separated the pavilions’ individual gardens from each other. Nina tipped her head back and drew in the scents of honeysuckle and rose.

A man stood on the path ten yards ahead, facing her.

Staring at her.

He stuck out because of his height — six feet four, perhaps — and the dark suit he was wearing. He had his hand to his ear and was talking into a cell phone. As Nina approached — her stride hadn’t faltered; she’d learned to avoid doing that, too — she realised he wasn’t looking at her, was simply gazing off into the distance as people sometimes do when on the phone.

She drew near and, as she passed him, glanced at his face. He was maybe forty, deeply tanned, his skin seamed by thin white scars which stood out in contrast.

She caught the liquid flash of his eye as he peered at her.

Once again terror choked her throat, though she walked on.

This time you have to look back, she told herself. He’s real. He won’t disappear.

Nina took six more steps. Then turned.

The man was gazing back at her over his shoulder.

She held his stare and after a second he glanced away, continuing his phone call. Nina walked backwards, keeping her eyes on him, but he didn’t turn again.

Despite herself, Nina broke into a stumbling run.

*

The leaves on the maple trees were flat hands grabbing for her, the unbroken dome of the sky a lid keeping her prisoner.

Of course it was possible the man had turned to look at her because they’d made eye contact and he was wondering if he knew her. Of course his might have been the normal reaction of a man noticing a young and reasonably attractive woman passing by. But Nina knew the difference between the feel of a man’s interested gaze and that of a Watcher.

This was definitely the latter.

She ran, and the cool lunchtime air sucked at her, trying to slow her, turning viscous. Ahead the perimeter of the campus beckoned and threatened, the anonymity of the city beyond. It was a small city, Charlottesville, and she wouldn’t be able to lose itself among its forty thousand souls the way she would in New York or Chicago.

She didn’t look back, even when she felt the footsteps pounding at her heels, even as the hand descended on her arm to slow her. Except it didn’t; that was imagination intruding again, bleeding into the real word, its thick strokes smudging the boundaries.

Time for meds, a crazy voice inside her piped up. Time at long last to start taking the pills, girl. And the hell with your violin playing.

Nina erupted on to the street, where suddenly young people didn’t predominate and elderly ladies with shopping baskets shuffled past harassed mothers with bunches of bawling kids sprouting from their hands. She weaved and jostled, the sidewalk like a combined minefield and obstacle course. Downtown reached for her in the near distance. There was her apartment, her haven. And while part of her laughed at the idea that she’d feel any safer there — the Watchers, after all, wouldn’t be deterred by the simple locks she’d had installed on the door and windows — another part shielded itself behind the atavistic power of the notion of home.

Three streets on, after a hair’s-breadth dodging of a car bumper and a forest of raised middle fingers, Nina slowed, her chest finally tightening in protest and her legs cramping.

She turned, swept the street left to right and back, ready to run again.

There was nobody. No tall tanned man striding in pursuit, no slowly cruising car with tinted windows and bald man in mirror shades presenting his granite face through the window.

No voices.

Nina sank to her knees, the crack of the sidewalk against bone sending unnoticed jabs of pain up her legs. She clasped her face in her hands.

It hadn’t been as intense as this for a long time. Six months, maybe.

When she felt ready to stand she did so, rising with a straight back, not trusting her balance to cope with the heft of the violin on her back and avoid toppling her over. She took her hands from her eyes, blinked at the garish glare of the noonday light around her.

A woman pushed an infant-laden stroller by her, smiling happily into Nina’s face.

Two businessmen in pinstripes, one fat and one thin like Laurel and Hardy, bustled past, arguing mildly.

A skateboarding kid sailed precariously close, too cool for school in his skinny gear and mantle of nonchalance.

Downtown Charlottesville was before her, familiar and unchanged.

Nina took a step, and another. Her legs worked. She was real again, calm and solid, not ephemeral as she’d started to be only minutes earlier. She wasn’t going to evaporate, was an entity that existed in its own right.

She smiled. Touching her violin through its case, she set off towards downtown.

And the men broke apart to let her between them: two of them, each in a suit, one black and one white. Each had a tiny dot in his ear, one in his right and the other in his left. She saw these as she glanced from one to the other when they passed.

Dreamily, she looked back.

They didn’t. Their backs receded.

But she knew, finally, that she hadn’t been wrong. This time it was real.

This time, the Watchers were moving in.

Five

Outside Amsterdam

Sunday 19 May, 11.30 am

‘Tickets, alsjeblieft.’

She was past forty with a weighed-down air and a nice, tired smile. Pope stirred out of his put-on doze and returned her grin.

‘Dank uw.’ She punched his ticket, caught his eye again. Her glance and her smile lingered.

Pope thought: Careful, now. The last thing he needed was to be remembered.

When she’d moved down the carriage he folded his Spiegel and over the edge of the paper watched the man opposite him. Middle fifties, Teutonic, and engrossed in a laptop which the reflection in his Himmler glasses revealed to be displaying a spreadsheet on its monitor.

The man probably wasn’t Service, or CIA, or German or Dutch intelligence. Pope couldn’t be certain. But then, it was always about probabilities.

The probability of John Purkiss’s arriving at Jablonsky’s house while Darius Pope was despatching Jablonsky was… low. Vanishingly so. Which meant, it was probable that Purkiss had been alerted to Pope’s presence in the city, and to his connection with Jablonsky. Which meant one of two things. Either, Jablonsky or Taylor had been tapped, and had revealed some connection with Pope. Or, Pope had been under suspicion for some time. The second was the more alarming possibility. It was also the less likely, Pope thought. He’d done nothing to arouse suspicion among the mandarins at the top ranks of the Service. He’d taken care to carve a career of solid, unspectacular achievement over the years. He’d done none of his research on Service time or using Service equipment. His tradecraft was exceptional; he found it hard to believe he’d allowed surveillance to gain much of a hold on him or his movements.

So one or both of the Americans had revealed something. it could have happened in one of a number of ways. Routine Service surveillance of the Company men might have picked something up — the most likely scenario. Or the pair had approached the Service themselves, for whatever reason.

In any case, Pope was now officially identified as the killer of two Company operatives. The Service knew this; perhaps the CIA did as well. The Service would be taking care not to let its transatlantic rival know of this, but it would struggle to keep it a secret for long. Which meant the Service was going to do its utmost to track down Pope, and neutralise him, before the Company found out about him. And they’d be using John Purkiss to do so.

Pope allowed his eyes to close and settled back in the seat, feeling the gentle rolling of the train beneath him. John Purkiss. He was an open secret within the Service, his actual identity suspected by some and known by fewer, his role accepted as a reality by all but the most naive. The Ratcatcher had emerged some five years ago, a vigilante of sorts. Pope had been a junior employee at the time, but he’d known his share of grafters, corner-cutters, agents on the make. Zero tolerance had been the mantra passed around, unwritten: the new way, the salve for the Service’s public wounds caused by scandal after scandal. It was no longer safe to take a little sweetener for the minor intelligence you passed on to your Iraqi police contact or your Shanghai stool pigeon. You’d be looking over your shoulder after doing the deed, and more likely than not would feel a hand descending on it.

Once Pope had tracked down the identity of the Ratcatcher, he’d gathered as much intelligence on Purkiss as he could find. An active agent since his recruitment after Cambridge in the late nineteen-nineties, Purkiss had excelled in the Mediterranean arena as a vetter of Islamist notaries in southern France and the Dalmatian coast. His fiancee, a fellow agent, Claire Stirling, had been murdered in 2008 by Donal Fallon, a senior operative who’d subsequently been arrested and convicted of murder, and had turned out to have been part of a black ops group within the Service, carrying out hits on people deemed a threat to British national security. Purkiss had left the Service soon after Fallon’s imprisonment.

And it was then the crackdown had begun in earnest, on the crooks and the chancers within the Service. Possibly it was a coincidence that Purkiss had disappeared at the same time. But Pope had run checks, analysed patterns of movement. Purkiss had been sighted at too many locations close to areas from which agents had quietly been removed, for mere chance to have been involved. No, Purkiss was the Ratcatcher. The probabilities were in its favour.

Purkiss had come close to besting Pope, and that rankled. Back at Jablonsky’s house, if he’d focused on taking Pope down instead of hesitating to ascertain if Jablonsky could be saved, Purkiss would have taken Pope down; Pope was certain of it. Later, after Pope had placed some distance between them and had allowed his natural advantage of stamina to come to the fore — he was more than half a decade younger than the other man, and the difference counted for more than people realised — Pope had been surer of his chances of winning. But even so, Purkiss had made him drop his blade, and had been deadly accurate with the chunk of metal he’d thrown at Pope’s head.

He’d been a formidable opponent, Purkiss; and he was behind, somewhere, and in pursuit. Which was why Pope had laid the trail he had.

He allowed his eyes to crack open a few millimetres. The Germanic businessman was still wrapped up in his perusal of his laptop spreadsheets. There were no likely candidates in the rest of the environment, nobody who could remotely pose a threat to Pope. Pope knew that was the first impression of the imminently dead.

Keeping his eyes minutely open, he allowed the feelings aroused by the killings to flood to the surface. Taylor’s death was the first, but Pope was surprised to find the sensory memories to be less intense in this case. Probably it was because he’d done it more quickly, putting the first bullet through Taylor’s face even as he turned; there’d been barely time to ensure the man recognised him, and even then Pope couldn’t be sure, as the lifelight dulled in the ruined eyes, that Taylor had fully appreciated who he was.

Jablonky’s killing had been different. The first shot, in the abdomen, had dropped him. Even if he’d been carrying a gun in his own kitchen — and given that Pope now knew Jablonsky might have been expecting him, that wasn’t so far fetched — he’d have had no opportunity to reach for it. That wouldn’t have been the case if Pope had hit him in the legs or the shoulder. On the kitchen floor, his hands cramped over the roiling surge from his belly, Jablonsky’s look had been that of a man who knew exactly what was happening to him, who was doing it to him, and why.

Pope had killed before, but never in such a planned way, and never with that same thrill of feeling he’d got from these two despatches. It was too soon after the killings for him to have any perspective on the emotions he was feeling, or what they signified about his personality. He’d tried them on for their fit; now he put them away again, as neatly as clothes into a wardrobe.

Once more he closed his eyes. This time, his thoughts turned towards not John Purkiss, not Taylor or Jablonsky, but somebody else.

*

23 June

Taylor brought in two more today. Prisoners, this time, local Hondurans by the look and sound of them. They’d been roughed up, which meant they probably resisted transfer.

Grosvenor and Z supervised the administration of the agent to each man in turn. I observed through the one-way mirrored glass. As before, the agent was intravenous, given by slow injection through an infusion set with saline running at the same time. Dehydration had been a problem with the last batch of subjects.

The first of the two men was the older and weaker-looking. Z stood by, making an occasional contribution — the glass wasn’t soundproofed but it did limit what I could hear — while Grosvenor conducted the interrogation. She paced, she alternately cajoled and raged and soothed; but she didn’t lay a finger on the man. The prisoner/subject didn’t hold out at all, started jabbering from the start. But he clearly wasn’t telling Grosvenor what she wanted to hear. As Grosvenor’s rantings grew more relentless the prisoner started gibbering and weeping. He was fastened to his chair and couldn’t move his torso or limbs, but his head rolled and slumped on his neck, back and forth.

After twenty-seven minutes — I kept time by the clock high on the wall at the back of the cell — the man died. His back went rigid, his neck arched, and all hell broke loose in the room. The medics ran in and Grosvenor and Z moved to free the man and lower him to the floor. I didn’t see the rest, but I found out later that he’d gone into cardiac arrest and all efforts to resuscitate him had failed.

The second of the two prisoners was more interesting, if that’s the word to use in a situation like this. He glared at his interrogators, scowled and spat at their questions, seemed intent on provoking and riling Grosvenor to make him lose control. Grosvenor’s performance was masterful — bearing in mind that I couldn’t hear much of what she was saying — in that she appeared at times close to snapping, to beating the prisoner into unconsciousness, but then switched to a demeanour of such sweet calmness that it must have been part of her stock-in-trade, and was unnerving in its obvious calculatedness. Grosvenor used physical force, to be sure: slapping, twisting the man’s ears, on one occasion grabbing his hair and forcing the head back past the point where it must have hurt; but there was never any sense that she was at the brink and ready to kill the prisoner for the sake of a moment’s gratification.

Thirty-nine minutes in, the prisoner began to show signs of fatiguing. His eyelids fluttered, his words — unheard by me — seemed to stumble from his mouth. Grosvenor pressed home her advantage, moving in ever closer to the man, wheedling and threatening and imploring, never stopping.

And then the experiment seemed to start bearing results. Frustrated at my inability to hear what was being said, I watched not Grosvenor or the prisoner but Z. He was standing back, presenting a one-quarter view to me through the one-way glass, but his back stiffened, his face tensing. Whatever the prisoner was saying, it was having an effect.

Grosvenor had gone very quiet — I could make out nothing she was saying, not even individual sounds — and her torso was between me and the prisoner, obscuring the man’s face. But when she stepped away, glancing across at Z, there was a flicker of triumph in her features.

The prisoner slumped in his seat, his torso held upright by his bonds but his head lolling forwards. For a moment I thought he’d succumbed, like the first man; but I caught sight of his eyes blinking faintly below his lowered brows. In a moment Z and Grosvenor conferred quickly and Z called something across. The medics came in, untied the prisoner and carted him away, having to support him under his arms if not quite carry him.

It was the first evidence I’d seen of the potential effectiveness of Caliban; and God help me, but I felt a stab of excitement at what they seemed to have achieved.

*

Pope had the words down pat in his memory. He was an eidetiker, one of those rare human beings with the ability to memorise text at a first reading; and he’d read the material more than once. He’d chosen this section to revisit, because the woman he was thinking about got a mention in the scenario. Had a starring role, in fact.

The woman was Grosvenor, and she was Pope’s next target.

Six

Hamburg

Sunday 19 May, 3.17 pm

Purkiss spotted the first tag two rows ahead of him on the plane. The second one he identified on the walk from the runway to the terminal building.

They were good, there was no question about that. The plane was a quarter empty so Purkiss had a range of seats to choose from, which meant the tags had the same; but instead of positioning themselves behind or beside him, at least one of them had sat in front. Not an obvious position for surveillance. But although the man never once glanced overtly across at Purkiss, never did anything to arouse the slightest suspicion, Purkiss sensed his otherness. He didn’t belong among the rest of the passengers. Again, there was nothing obvious about his appearance to suggest this: in his middle thirties, dressed in a navy suit and perusing the International Herald Tribune, he looked like just another cosmopolitan businessman on a mid-afternoon trans-European trip. But his aura of toughness, of centred wariness, gave him away to somebody with Purkiss’s sensitivity to such things.

The second man must have been sitting behind Purkiss. Walking across the tarmac in the light, cold rain that had greeted the Lufthansa flight, Purkiss stopped and turned as if to peer up at the plane he’d just left. Several people behind him glanced at him as they passed, but the tag — this one younger, shorter, his dark narrow looks more intense than those of the first man — avoided his gaze in a way that was deliberate.

Purkiss strode past the man towards the terminal, wanting to maintain the pretence that he was unaware of the surveillance. He felt the familiar cold burn between his shoulder blades, a primal reaction to the experience of exposing one’s back to an enemy. Ahead, on the escalator rising into the terminal building, he saw the first man.

He wasn’t sure, but they felt like Americans. CIA men.

*

Purkiss was travelling under his own name — there hadn’t been time to organise a cover passport before catching the flight out of Schiphol, and in any case there didn’t appear to be any need for a covert identity at this point — and experienced a flicker of tension when the woman at passport control glanced at his picture and then at his face. It was an old Service mantra: the longer you worked in the field, the more databases your details were likely to appear on. He hadn’t done much work in Germany before but the country’s intelligence service would have picked him up on their radar at some point, he was certain of it.

Nonetheless he was nodded through. He made his way past the baggage hall and through the EU arrivals channel. The first tag was lost from sight in the crowds milling in the arrivals hall. Purkiss slowed once he’d run the gauntlet of card-wielding greeters and pretended to rummage in the briefcase he was carrying. The second tag didn’t pass him, and was therefore hanging back, probably as the rear half of a box formation.

If they were Company, it suggested Jablonsky and Taylor had made their colleagues aware of Pope, and somehow the link had been made to Purkiss. Perhaps they’d had Pope’s flat under surveillance and had followed Purkiss from there to Jablonsky’s house. Purkiss didn’t think so; he was almost always aware when he was being tagged, as now.

And if the men were Company, it meant there’d be reinforcements here in Hamburg. Perhaps waiting outside the airport at that very moment.

Purkiss had two options. He could either make a break for the exit, running the risk of being taken down by whomever was waiting for him outside but with a chance of getting entirely clear; or stay inside the terminal and draw the surveillance in, man by man, in the hope of getting one of them under control and gleaning information from him.

He made his decision.

*

Purkiss could crack locks, and the one on the door was an uncomplicated Yale; but the trick was to do it quickly enough to avoid attracting attention. He’d walked the length of the terminal until he’d spotted the corridor leading in the direction of staff offices. Halfway down was the door bearing the legend Mitarbeiter Nur. Staff Only.

He fumbled with his keys as he worked the lock, making out that he was having difficulty fitting the correct one. Two people passed behind his back, seeming not to pay him any attention.

The door yielded and he stepped inside. Yes, as he’d though: a storage room, little more than a large walk-in closet, its shelves laden mainly with cleaning materials. And his sense of the geography of the building had been correct. A fan window near the ceiling let the daylight in.

He hauled himself up the rack of shelves beneath the window and wrestled with the handle, which was stiff with disuse. Pushing the window open, he forced his head and shoulders through. It was tight, but a man could fit through it. Purkiss withdrew, leaving the window as far open as he could force it.

The ceiling above him was panelled with fibreglass squares laid loose on a metal framework. He pushed one of the panels up and peered through the gap. A narrow crawlspace stretched off in all directions into darkness. Gripping the metal bars, Purkiss pulled himself through the gap and balanced on the framework, taking care not to let his weight bear down directly on the panels, which didn’t look as if they’d hole. He slid the panel back into place.

There was noise in the crawlspace, the amplified sounds of the colossal building all around him, and he had to strain to listen for any sounds from below. The tags would have seen him head off in the direction of the corridor.

After perhaps a minute, the airport noises became louder below him, and he realised the door to the storage room had opened. He dared not shift one of the panels aside to look down, so he relied on his hearing. Somebody was in the room below. A low voice muttered something; Purkiss couldn’t catch what was said, or even the language.

The quiet from below resumed. Purkiss gave it five minutes, breathing through his mouth, not stirring. Then he edged one of the ceiling panels aside and peered down. The room was empty. His ruse had worked, and they’d assumed he’d escaped through the window.

He hung from the metal rafters and dropped straight down to the floor, and at that moment the man charged forward and barrelled into his torso.

Purkiss was knocked back against a rack of shelves, the hard steel against his back nothing compared with the pain in his abdomen where the man’s shoulder had connected. Winded, he doubled over and the man pressed a forearm across his throat. Purkiss brought his knee up but the man blocked it with his leg and rammed his free fist below Purkiss’s sternum. Purkiss tensed his abdomen in time to absorb the worst of the blow, but not all of it.

It was the narrow-faced man, the second of the two tags, his strength feral and sinewy as he drove his arm against Purkiss’s neck, pressing down on the carotid arteries, causing the first lightheadedness. He pinned Purkiss’s right arm against the shelves with his own left hand. Purkiss’s free arm flailed beside him, useless, out of range of the man’s head.

His vision was blurring now, events around him taking on a distant, disconnected quality. Purkiss seized something in his hand, an aerosol by the feel of it. His thumb flicked off the plastic lid and he brought the can as far forward as he could and pressed the plunger on the top.

His aim was slightly off but enough of the spray hissed into the man’s face to make him cry out and recoil, his arm slackening across Purkiss’s throat. Purkiss shoved the aerosol closer and gave the man another blast, straight into his eyes. The man reeled against the shelves opposite, hands clamped over his face, trying to suppress gasps of agony that were slipping out as tiny screams.

Purkiss dropped the man with a hammer-fist to the forehead, caught him as he crumpled and lowered him to the floor. Time was short, and in any case he wasn’t fit to answer questions. His passport identified him as Henry Vasquez, U.S. citizen. Purkiss memorised the details — it was false ID, of course, but worth a check — and, wincing at the pain beneath his breastbone, stepped out into the corridor.

There was nobody there. In the main concourse he scanned the crowds. There was no sign of the other tag, who was most likely outside: they’d kept their options open in case Purkiss had escaped through the window after all.

*

He left the terminal quickly but unhurriedly, bracing himself for the swoop of men descending on him or cars braking up on the pavement before him. There was no sign of anybody watching or closing in, just a frantic press for the available taxis as the drizzle thickened to hard rain.

Nonetheless, when a cab driver beckoned, Purkiss ducked his head into the taxi closest to him, thrust a handful of Euro notes at the couple squeezing in the back and asked if they’d swap with the other one on offer. They agreed, startled at first and then amused. The last thing he needed was a Company-paid cabbie delivering him straight into enemy hands.

As the driver plunged into dense traffic, Purkiss pondered. The surveillance had ended with one man down. There was no welcoming committee. That meant there’d probably been only the two men after all.

It wasn’t the way the Company worked.

Seven

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 4.15 pm

Nina managed to take the mug and bring it to her lips without a tremble, surprising herself.

‘Need something a little stronger?’

Rachel perched on the arm of the couch, unfeigned concern knitting her forehead. Nina had known her since college; Rachel had majored in chemistry but shared her love of music. She was probably the person Nina was closest to, Nina realised with a dismayed start. They saw each other every three or four weeks.

Nina shook her head. ‘Tea’s good.’

Rachel gave it thirty seconds, then said: ‘Tell me.’

Nina felt the old dread haul itself tiredly to its feet. They did various things, the people she spoke to about her fears. Some frowned in sympathy, others snorted with derision. The occasional person even backed away. But what they all did, each and every one of them, was not believe her.

‘I’m being followed.’

After a beat Rachel said, ‘You mean, like, stalked?’

Behind her voice, her expression, Nina hunted for the unspoken thought: here we go again.

‘No. Several men. Three, four so far. I don’t know.’ Spoken like a true crazy person.

‘Where? On campus?’

‘Yes, and in the streets.’ Nina breathed deeply, keeping her voice under control. Jabbering wouldn’t do her any favours. ‘I don’t want you to believe me, Rach, and I don’t want you to call the doctor. I’m fine. Fine… in that way, I mean. I just want to stay here a little while, if that’s okay.’

‘Girl.’ Rachel slid on to the couch beside her. ‘You stay as long as you want. And listen. Let’s get this straight, right now. Do I believe there are three or four guys following you? I don’t. But I believe you did notice someone staring at you — a creep, or a nice guy, who knows? You’re a pretty girl — and it’s freaked you out. That I can understand, and that’s enough for me.’

Nina nodded. She didn’t say thanks for being honest, which was what she wanted to say, because the next thing she’d blurt out would be but what if they come looking for me here.

Rachel put a hand on her back. ‘Haven’t seen you in a month. You been okay?’

‘Till this morning, yes.’

Rachel lived with her boyfriend Kyle, a games designer, in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenbrier. Nina had spent the better part of two hours crossing and recrossing the city, on foot and by bus. Every time she thought she was clear there’d be a glimpse again: a suited man in silhouette against a window, a human shape ducking back out of sight behind a corner. In the last quarter hour the glimpses had gone.

Rachel was between jobs and, luckily for Nina, was home. Her eyes had flared in alarm when she’d opened the door to Nina’s knocking. She’d seen Nina once before like this, after her grandmother’s death when the Watchers had reappeared and crowded closer than ever against the invisible glass enclosing Nina’s life. On that occasion Rachel had taken her in for a week, nursed her back, persuaded her to see the doctor and accept meds, at least in the short term. The doctor had wanted to refer her for follow up, had urged her to start on a regular course of antipsychotics, but as always she’d refused.

In the kitchen now, Nina helped Rachel prepare the evening meal, tossing salads and chopping vegetables. Rachel glanced at her from time to time, not often enough to make her feel uncomfortable. At one point she said, ‘Are the voices back?’

‘No. Not this time.’ Nina managed a smile. But she wondered if it was only a matter of time. Usually the voices came first, warning her she was being watched, before the fear set in. Sometimes it was one voice, a woman’s; sometimes a man’s voice would join in. They never addressed Nina directly, but always spoke about her as though she wasn’t there.

Through the kitchen door came the sound of keys in a lock and a man’s voice: ‘Hey, babe.’ Nina gasped and dropped the colander she was holding, leaves and tomatoes exploding across the floor. Rachel hurried to her, wrapped her in her arms.

Kyle came into the kitchen, loose-limbed and rangy, his pony tail swinging. ‘Nina! Great to — ’

He caught Nina’s eye across Rachel’s shoulder, grimaced in concern.

Rachel gave him a swift, undramatic summary. Kyle nodded throughout, watching Rachel and Nina in turn, with none of the embarrassment others might have shown.

Supper was at six, burritos loaded with everything Rachel could find in the refrigerator. Nina’s appetite was huge, as it often was to her surprise at times like this. It was as though her body was preparing itself for a fight. Kyle cracked open bottles of Mexican beer. Nina declined. Booze never helped: the fear only expanded and her ability to cope with it diminished.

Afterwards they lounged on the eclectic sprawl of beanbags and couches that made up the living room furniture and chatted about Kyle’s work, Nina’s playing, Rachel’s as yet unsuccessful attempts to find a new job. For a while it was as though circumstances were normal, as if they were a trio of old friends simply catching up after a long separation. The evening drew in, the daylight contracting and the shadows spreading across the room as the sun worked its way behind the apartment block.

Nina realised suddenly that she didn’t have any extra clothes, or a toothbrush. Nor did she have a plan. She could stay with Rachel and Kyle one night, two, a week — and then what? Home again, alone, each creak on the landing outside her door, each glance from a stranger in the street sending her running in terror?

Maybe it was time, at last, to consider meds. She hadn’t done any research in the area for over a year; there might be new products available, ones that didn’t impair your dexterity, make your hands shake. She’d have that talk with Rachel tomorrow, perhaps, when they were on their way to Rachel’s latest interview. Tonight was for burrowing down, feeling comfortable and comforted, protected from the darkness.

Kyle asked her opinion on a selection of soundtrack options for a new role-playing game he was developing. One of the pieces in particular unnerved her: it sounded like a sample of Penderecki’s Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima laid over a grinding industrial beat.

Rachel seemed to sense her discomfort because she sighed, ‘Jesus, Kyle, turn that shit off.’

He rolled his eyes at Nina and clicked on to another track.

The knock came at the door, four raps, firm but polite.

Nina felt her abdominal contents squeeze upwards, compressing her chest. Kyle and Rachel glanced at each other.

‘Damn Bobby’s forgotten his keys again.’ Their neighbour across the hall. Rachel rose, went down the tiny entrance hall to the door.

Nina sat frozen while Kyle noodled about with his laptop, though she could tell he was listening hard.

Rachel appeared at the door again, a slight frown around her eyes. Quietly she said, ‘There’s three men out there.’

Nina’s innards were forcing their way up through her throat now.

The knock came again. ‘Ms Rachel Carver?’

The apartment was in her name, Nina recalled distantly.

She was aware she’d said something but wasn’t sure Rachel had heard, so she repeated it: ‘What do they look like?’

Rachel stepped into the room, her voice low. ‘Hard to see through the fisheye, but one’s tall, tan, dark hair. They’re all in suits.’

‘That’s him.’ Nina was on her feet now, swaying with the suddenness. ‘The guy from campus.’

For the first time, ever, Nina saw doubt in Rachel’s face. Not quite belief, yet.

The knocking was harder now, less patient.

‘Ms Carver, please open the door. Federal agents.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Kyle stared at them in turn, then strode out of the room. He turned not towards the front door but the bedroom.

Rachel called after him, ‘Whoah, hold on, Kyle.’

Nina swallowed, her throat raw and crackling.

Five seconds later Kyle emerged, right arm raised, a gun gripped in his knuckly fist. Rachel hissed, ‘Oh God, Kyle, no.’

His jaw was clenched, his eyes scared. He jerked his head at them.

‘Stay back.’

Nina wondered if there was marijuana in the apartment. It wouldn’t be the first time.

From out of sight she heard Kyle at the door: ‘Show me some ID.’

More distantly still came an older man’s voice. ‘Who are you?’

‘None of your god damn business. Hold up some ID.’

‘Sir, this would be a whole lot easier if you opened the door — ’

‘This conversation’s over.’

‘All right.’

There was silence for a beat. Kyle came back into the living room.

‘Looks like FBI. Guy’s name’s Claymore.’

His eyes were still frightened. Nina wondered if he’d ever fired the gun before. He didn’t look as if he knew where to point it.

‘Ask him what he wants,’ murmured Rachel. She grabbed Nina’s hand, squeezed it.

Nina pulled away, stepped over to the doorway and peered round to hear better. Kyle had his eye against the lens in the front door again.

He said, ‘What’s your business? I’m not opening the door till you say.’

‘We have a warrant for the arrest of Ms Nina Ramirez. We believe she’s in the apartment with you.’

From behind her in the living room, Nina heard Rachel give a little cry.

Kyle said, his voice faltering, ‘What’s the charge?’

Nina winced. It was the wrong response. Effectively, it was an admission that she was in the apartment.

From beyond the door the voice was louder, an edge to it. ‘Sir, I’ve already shown you ID and answered your question. Either you open this door right now, or you and Ms Carver will be charged with aiding and abetting a felon.’

Nina watched Kyle’s back. His breathing was faster, and uneven.

After a moment he said, ‘Hey, fuck you, pal,’ and backed down the passage, gun arm raised, almost colliding with Nina in the living room doorway. Rachel was just behind her, gripping her shoulder.

Kyle said, ‘The fire escape.’

It ran past the bathroom; Nina remembered seeing it through the clouded glass. Rachel jerked at her arm.

‘Go,’ she whispered.

‘You’ve got to come.’

‘No way. I need to speak to these guys before Dirty Harry here gets himself killed.’ She gave Nina a small shove in the direction of the bathroom. ‘You were never here.’ To Kyle she muttered through clenched teeth: ‘Put the gun away, for God’s sake.’

The first blow against the front door splintered the wood around the lock and one hinge, the sound reaching Nina’s ears a fraction of a second after the door bulged at them. The second came before any of them had a chance to yell. This one was accompanied by a crack as the safety chain was yanked taut.

Rachel pushed Nina so hard she stumbled. Nina made it to the end of the passage and stopped. At her feet was her violin in its case, where she’d propped it against the wall on her arrival. She lifted it. Kyle’s stance was one of dynamic indecision, the gun raised and aimed but his posture suggesting imminent flight. Rachel clung to his other arm.

Over her shoulder Rachel shrieked, ‘Go,’ and the command was like a blow knocking Nina through the doorway and into not the bathroom, but Rachel and Kyle’s bedroom. Behind her the front door gave way in a roar of tearing timber that was drowned by yells.

Nina strapped the violin case across her back, leapt over the bed and dragged the drapes apart as the first blast came, horribly close — a vague part of her understood it must have been Kyle who fired — and hauled at the sash window, ramming it upwards as far as it would go. The apartment was one storey up. Directly below was a concrete walkway at the rear of the block. The lawn was impossibly far away.

She had one leg across the sill when noise exploded after her. She looked back. Rachel had backed into the room and was screaming. Beyond her Kyle came running in, except he wasn’t running, he was flying, propelled by something that was punching him along and flinging his limbs crazily. Rachel lurched towards Nina and she recoiled instinctively, dragging her other leg across the sill so that she was perched on her ass. The front of Rachel’s dress was a Rorschach of gore, her face a wide-eyed fright mask. Then Rachel spun through ninety degrees, the same forces that had turned Kyle into a bloody marionette having their way with her.

Nina dropped through the cool evening air for an astonishingly brief moment before the shocking impact with the walkway drove pain through her ankles and her knees and up through her back and neck. She tipped forward, the violin on her back her baby, needing protection no matter what the cost to herself, and came to rest, with her face pressed against the concrete. She felt nothing; no heart hammering in her chest, no breath sawing in her throat.

So this was death.

She twisted her head round and peered up.

High above her, God gazed down. A bald man with white, flashing eyes.

Reborn, resurrected, Nina scrambled into a stooped, loping posture like an ape’s, every bone and muscle screaming defiance at her.

She began to run.

Eight

Hamburg

Sunday 19 May, 6.20 pm

‘You’ll find everything you need in here.’

Bracknell, the agent in the Service’s Hamburg station assigned to help Purkiss, had taken an instant dislike to him. He was used to the reaction, but the hostility wasn’t normally quite as undisguised as this. She barely made eye contact, ignored his proffered hand, and after leading him in silence to the tiny office they’d provided for him, slapped a memory stick down beside the antediluvian desktop computer.

After she’d left — no tea or coffee was offered — Purkiss set to work. The stick contained details of all Pope’s operations during his time in Hamburg. As Gifford had said, Pope had been in the city two years and his work had involved humdrum if essential stuff: analysis of immigration patterns, the forging of connections with local agencies such as the police, the occasional background check on up-and-coming local political figures. No liaison, officially or otherwise, with the city’s CIA presence, as far as Purkiss could tell.

Vale had also arranged for the Hamburg station to provide whatever was known about the local CIA structure and personnel, and this too was on the memory stick. It proved even less useful than the material about Pope. Neither Jablonsky’s nor Taylor’s names came up, and there was no suggestion of any overlap between known Company operations in the city and those Pope had been involved in, even peripherally.

Two hours later Purkiss stood and stretched, feeling weighed down by frustration. There was nothing there he could work with. Nothing that gave any indication as to why Pope might have been surveilling two CIA operatives in Amsterdam, and have shot them dead. The information could as easily have been sent to Purkiss in Amsterdam, but he’d come to Hamburg because of the possibility that Pope had returned here.

He walked the cramped corridors, knocking on a few doors until he found Bracknell hunched over her own computer. She looked even surlier than before. Purkiss realised it was after eight in the evening, that she was probably supposed to be off duty.

‘Couple of questions.’

She shrugged.

‘Did you know Pope yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your impression of him? Thumbnail sketch.’

For the first time she looked Purkiss in the eye. ‘He’s a hard worker. A charmer, yes, but deeper than that. Committed. Passionate, even. Wasted here.’

He turned you down, but you still hold out hope, Purkiss thought. He said: ‘Bent?’

Anger flared in her eyes. It was more interesting than the dislike. ‘No more than the rest of us. Less so, probably.’

‘All right. Thanks.’ He tossed her the memory stick.

To his back she said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. The effect people like you have on morale. Hounding us. Persecuting us.’

‘You don’t know what Pope’s done.’

‘And you can’t tell me.’

‘No.’

*

Purkiss had booked a room at a hotel on Stephansplatz near the city centre. He ate a light supper, then stretched on the bed, going over the events of the day methodically, laying them out in his head for his mind to work with while he slept.

He’d never been an insomniac, and still wasn’t, but in recent months early nights had been a bad idea because the hour before sleep would be filled inevitably with brooding. Tonight was no exception. Claire’s death used to fill the crevices of his mind; now it was Claire’s betrayal as well. How much of their life together had been a lie? It was a question that could never be answered. Vale had once said to him that self-delusion was one of the few things that enabled people to cope, or words to that effect. Purkiss, a sceptic by inclination and education, found himself increasingly craving certainty in his life.

And then there was Abby. She’d been one of his two closest friends, even though as far as he could remember she’d never addressed him by his first name. Salt of the earth, and she’d been cut to pieces — murdered — during a hostage exchange at the base of a tower in Tallinn. Purkiss had let her down.

Claire, dead, and perhaps he could have saved her from herself. Abby, dead because of his blindness. Even Elle Klavan, who wasn’t dead but whose life and loyalties had been shaken loose because of Purkiss. It seemed women suffered when he came into their lives.

That way lay self-pity, the most corrosive and pointless state of all. Purkiss set a metronome in his head and watched the banal precision of its mechanism until sleep took him.

*

Purkiss flailed at the bedside table until he realised the buzzing was coming not from an alarm but from his phone. He peered at the time display before answering. Just after six in the morning. He’d slept nearly eight hours.

Vale said: ‘There’s been another killing. A Company man. Pope’s hoodwinked us.’

‘Where?’

‘New York City.’

Nine

Langley, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 7.40 am

Ray Giordano was a lapsed Catholic, but not so lapsed that days like this couldn’t make him long for the comfort of ritual, of simple shared certainties.

He sat at his desk and used his electric razor to shave the tops of his cheeks — his beard would grow right up under his eyes if he didn’t — and stared at the image on the monitor. The sack had been moved aside from the head for the purpose of the photograph. ‘Head’ was too generous a word. It was a face attached to a bag of slop.

Naomi and Kenny came in bearing coffee and doughnuts. Kenny had pulled the night shift but was still here; Naomi had come in early. Giordano swivelled the monitor round for them to look. Kenny had already seen it — he’d been on duty when the call came in — but he gritted his teeth nonetheless. Naomi swallowed hard.

‘Jesus, boss.’

She must have heard it from Kenny already, but Giordano said: ‘Sylvia Grosvenor. Pitched from the ninth storey of an apartment block in midtown Manhattan at a little after eight p.m. last night. She hit the sidewalk headfirst, as you can probably see. In true New York style, nobody saw anything.’

Giordano took a sip of his coffee. It could have stripped varnish off a door. ‘The Manhattan boys have found nothing in Grosvenor’s apartment, though the door was forced. The CCTV was disabled on that floor. Doorman swears nobody unfamiliar got by him, and the cameras in the lobby bear out what he says. They reckon whoever did it may have gotten in from the basement through the service elevator.’

He grabbed the box of doughnuts and took a bite. From his desk, Adrienne’s photo reproached him.

‘The New York people are over this like flies, but it’s been passed on to us. It links in with the Amsterdam hits. No question.’

Kenny and Naomi glanced at one another, shuffled. Giordano waved them into the chairs across his desk and pushed the doughnut box over. ‘What?’

Kenny: ‘You said, “No question”.’

‘Yeah.’

Naomi said, ‘Different MO. Different, uh, country, boss. On the same day.’

Giordano swigged more of the foul brew. ‘Different time zones. Plenty of opportunity to get from Europe to the East Coast and carry out all three kills.’ He half-hid a belch, sat up in his groaning chair. ‘Look, guys. You’ve heard the saying. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. That’s exactly what we’ve got here. Three active Company operatives taken down in quick succession. It’s the same group. Or the same guy.’

*

The Director had come in person. Giordano knew he’d been scheduled to meet a senator at the time, and that the meeting had had either to be cut short or cancelled. Giordano knew too what this would have cost the Director, in terms of both political brownie points and pride. He’d arrived at Giordano’s office rather than summoning Giordano to his, which was unheard of. Behind the Director, Grace, Giordano’s PA, had hovered, cool and professional and quaking, before Giordano waved her away.

After briefing Giordano — it was little he didn’t already know about the Jablonsky and Taylor killings, which he’d heard about an hour earlier — the Director said: ‘It’s your baby, Ray. No fanfare. Keep it quiet. But whatever you need, you’ve got. Manpower, money, intel. No restrictions.’

It had to be kept quiet because the murders of two Company agents was such big news it would send tremors through the organisation that would have a serious effect on its stability and morale, worldwide. Unless the news could be preempted by a scoop of some kind, a breakthrough in the tracking down of the perpetrator. Giordano knew this, as he knew that the Director was aware Giordano was four years off retirement and wouldn’t want to screw this up and risk his pension being snatched away from under his nose at this late stage.

So Giordano had taken charge of the investigation, setting his bloodhounds Naomi and Kenny on the trail, good kids both.

That was yesterday morning. Last night the New York killing had upped the ante.

*

‘And there’s still nothing on the cameras outside Jablonsky’s place.’

Naomi had been trawling, pumping her Amsterdam sources for all they were worth. Jablonsky had surveillance rigged up outside his apartment. He’d been a suspect once in a Company sting operation, suspected of dealing hard drugs in the city, and although he’d been cleared both officially and unofficially, the cameras had been left in place. But the local Company crew had found them to be out of working order when they’d checked, so there’d been no record of anybody entering or leaving Jablonsky’s apartment. Taylor had had no such surveillance on him.

Giordano finished his coffee and set to work on the last doughnut. ‘Okay. Kenny, you run a search on Grosvenor. Find out what her current operational status was, what she’s been involved in over the last ten years. Cross reference it with the other two.’ He knew Kenny knew this stuff. He was saying it just to cover the fact that he had nothing else to suggest at the moment.

He stood. ‘Naomi. Come with me.’

*

In the corridor he put a hand on her back.

‘Kenny’s good, but you’re better. I need you to be a backstop. Double-check his work without letting him know.’

She sighed. ‘Boss, that’s not right.’

‘It is and it isn’t. It’s not right because you’re friends. But I can’t afford anything to be missed here, so it damn well is right in the scheme of things.’

‘Yeah.’

She went back to his office to rejoin Kenny. Giordano took a walk down the corridors, following a route he’d trodden hundreds of times over the years through the Langley labyrinth. It helped him think.

*

Adrienne had been on his case to retire early. They’d been married just twelve years — a second marriage for each of them — and she’d been frank about it from the outset, that she wasn’t looking to share her husband with his job like the last time and wanted the bulk of their time together to be spent in happy, adventurous retirement. She herself was a Pentagon systems analyst, good at what she did but with a firm sense of her life’s priorities.

It was a myth, he knew: the one last job that made your legacy for you. You stood or fell by your overall record in the Company over many years, and his was pretty good: the successes outweighed the screwups at least five to one, which was decent odds. And yet… a calamitous error right at the end of your career was something that was likely to linger in people’s minds, if not those of the top brass then at least the rank and file. It was bad for morale; it told the younger recruits that the older ones weren’t perhaps the gods and legends they’d come to believe in. That in the upper ranks of the Company there were people who weren’t perfect.

So he needed to get this right, if not for himself then for the future of the Company. No pressure, then.

Ten

New York City

Monday 20 May, 9.50 am

The train was more crowded than the one he’d taken in Amsterdam, and grimier; but it suited Pope’s purposes.

He liked trains, preferred to travel using them instead of planes or even cars wherever possible. They allowed you a degree of mobility in times of crisis and they could be stopped suddenly when needed. They allowed you to think, in a way that wasn’t possible when driving. By the time the Amtrak carriage pulled out of Penn Station Pope was deep in thought.

The Grosvenor hit had been harder than he’d expected, but had still gone more or less according to plan. Pope had studied the layout of the apartment block several weeks beforehand, noting potential access points and discarding them immediately: the roof, the front door (obviously), even the windows of the lower floors. Entry through the service elevator hadn’t been difficult. Nobody took notice of a man in overalls and a cap.

The hard part had been Grosvenor herself. She was in her fifties, mahogany-tanned and hard as leather, and she’d reacted quickly when Pope had kicked the door open into her, bolting across the room for both her phone and her gun — she kept the two close together, something Pope noted with professional approval despite himself. Pope used a vase as a projectile, not hitting Grosvenor hard but causing her to lose her momentum and providing enough of a distraction that Pope was able to reach her before she could get the safety off her pistol. From then it had been more straightforward: a headlock, fingers against the carotids to subdue without killing or bringing on unconsciousness, and then the march across to the window.

Before Pope tipped Grosvenor out he removed his cap and stared hard at her face. The second he saw the understanding — the recognition, even — he heaved, sending the woman headfirst and flailing into the cold evening sky. He didn’t look down, just closed the window once more and made his exit.

Three hours and he’d be at Union Station, Washington, D.C. The first leg of the journey would be over. Pope let his eyes rest open a crack, as was his habit, and ran another part of the document through his memory.

*

27 July

I once asked Z about the name, Caliban. Had he given the operation the title? Yes, he’d chosen it himself. In that case I was puzzled, I said. Caliban represented the base, primal aspects of the human character, those untamed by civilisation and culture. Wouldn’t the title be better suited to trials of an aggression-enhancing product of some kind?

Z’s reply was interesting. He said years of experience had taught him that truth-telling was one of the most basic, animal features of the human psyche. It was only with increasing civilisation and socialisation that we learned deceit, subterfuge. Caliban, the operation, was about releasing the honesty within its subjects.

It made me want go back and reread The Tempest, to see if Shakespeare had considered this.

The next round of trials took place today. The numbers were greater this time. Twelve subjects in all. According to Z, fully half of them were volunteers; though as always I wondered just how voluntary the participation of a convicted felon in a clinical trial could be.

I watched four of the experiments. Grosvenor conducted them all, and seemed utterly drained by the end. Interrogation can be hard work. With three of the subjects she achieved results, the men breaking down within an hour, sometimes sooner, and confessing to deeds that were verifiable.

Only one of the subjects died that day. Z proclaimed himself satisfied with progress.

There was, after all, no great rush.

19 August

I have been here three months now. Twice a week a ship arrives carrying supplies; otherwise the Caribbean around us is as hot and blue and empty as might be expected. It’s a comfortable if unspectacular existence. My evenings are spent talking to Z and to the doctors involved, or researching in the compound’s small but well-appointed library. Some of what I need is available on the Internet, but access is restricted for security reasons so I dare not use it too recklessly.

Taylor suspects me, I think. He has taken an unusual interest in my work, more than is warranted. Once I looked up from my desk in the library to find him in the doorway, watching me silently.

One day I’ll set this journal down on paper, either through dictation or by typing it myself. For the moment, it must remain in my head, filed away day by day in the only place prying eyes can’t possibly see it.

15 September

How many more deaths can I allow? Today there were six, on the worst day since the trial began. Six out of eight subjects. A seventy-five per cent mortality rate. Unacceptable by anybody’s standards, even those of the product’s designers and creators.

Z shows his stress in restrained ways: a clenching of the hands behind his back, the faintest tightening at his jaw. But the pressure inside him must be enormous. Grosvenor and Jablonsky took turns conducting the interrogations today, and became so irritated with one another between cases they almost came to blows.

There’s talk of a huge shipment of new subjects early next month, perhaps as many as fifty. The product will have to be studied closely after today’s events; there might have been a contaminated batch used, but if not, then modifications will need to be made to the product before Z will allow it to be tested again. He can’t afford wastage like today’s.

I can prevent the next death quite easily. A simple phone call will do it, will bring the US Navy and the Marines down upon the island like a hailstorm. But it’s too soon. Open though Z has been with me, he continues to withhold the name I need. Blowing the whistle at this point will more than likely mean that the person who has furthest to fall in all this will escape.

Six weeks, I’ll give it. Taylor is already suspicious; it’s only a matter of time until Jablonsky and Grosvenor and Z himself see through my cover. Six weeks — and God knows how many deaths — and I’ll do it.

*

Pope stopped the flow of words at that point and switched his thoughts to John Purkiss. He had no way of knowing where Purkiss was at that moment, could only assume that his ruse had worked and Purkiss was wasting time and energy in Hamburg. Once news got out of Grosvenor’s killing, of course, Purkiss would be back on the trail. But there was no way he’d work out the pattern, no chance of his heading south and ambushing Pope there. At worst, Purkiss would be tearing Manhattan apart looking for him when Pope carried out the next stage of his plan.

And after the final one, after Z, there’d be no more.

Pope himself would disappear forever. He probably wouldn’t survive; but even if he did, what he would do with the rest of his life he had no idea. It was something he’d never considered. It was an irrelevance. His entire adult life had been shaped around his pursuit of the target that was now within his sights.

Numerically speaking, he’d achieved three quarters of his goal. Three dead, one to go. But his final target outweighed the others. That was why he’d saved Z until last. He wanted the man to know he was coming.

He wanted him to squirm.

Eleven

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 6.40 pm

Nina ran.

Through the neon-emblazoned streets of downtown Charlottesville she wove, stumbling, the violin case bouncing at her back. The evening was crowded for a Monday, as though the population had spilled on to the streets in order to slow her down or maybe to jeer at her. Here a doorway yawned toothlessly at her; there an overturned trashcan spilled its debris across her path like an arm trying to trip her up.

There were no more watchers because everyone was a watcher. Everybody around her was an enemy to be dodged and fled from.

But there were no voices. Yet.

In her mind’s eye she saw Rachel’s body flung this way and that by the shots, her face crimson and almost accusing as her eyes met Nina’s for the last time.

She’d killed them both. She should have stayed away.

Nina slowed, the ragged breath sawing in her throat, and gazed about. Somehow she’d arrived at the Mall, the most congested place she could have picked. On her left was the Pavilion. She and the quartet had performed there many times.

Strolling toward her, coffee cup in hand, was a uniformed cop.

Nina did a back and forth shuffle that would have been comical in a slapstick movie: preparing to run one second, then starting toward the cop, then taking fright again. An authority figure, a public symbol of law and order and safety. She ought to feel reassured by his presence.

But the men at the door had been federal agents, or at least had been carrying ID that suggested they were.

The cop was looking straight at her. Grinning.

Nina took a step backwards, then another.

The hand on her elbow made her yelp. Close to her ear a woman’s voice said: ‘Whoah there. Steady.’

Nina stared round, saw that she’d backed into another cop. The first one had been grinning at her, his partner, not at Nina.

‘You okay, miss?’

The male cop had reached her. Although the female one had backed off a little, Nina felt crowded, hemmed in.

She realised she was staring stupidly from one to the other.

‘Fine.’ Had she said it? She wasn’t sure, so she repeated it, shouting too loudly this time. A couple of passersby glanced over.

The woman cop was running a careful eye over her. Nina didn’t like that. ‘You look sick, honey.’

Nina became aware suddenly of the hair slicked to her face with sweat, the shirt clinging to her armpits. She hefted the violin case, feeling it slipping, and immediately the cops were on guard, hands if not quite on their holsters then hovering in the vicinity.

They think I might have a machine gun in here, she thought, and rammed down an impulse to laugh.

Once more her eyes darted from one face to the other. The woman cop looked sympathetic and a little concerned. The guy’s expression was more sceptical, as though he thought he was up against yet another student strung out on speed or acid on a school night while hardworking people like himself were trying to earn a crust. She was dimly aware that the more she glanced from one to the other, the crazier — or guiltier — she appeared.

Suddenly she had it: a way she could get help of a sort from them if they weren’t in league with the men who’d come to the apartment and killed her friends.

‘Apartment eight, first floor, Allentown Heights,’ she blurted. ‘Adams Street. Two people are dead there. My friends. They live there. They did, anyhow. Some men killed them.’

Nina took a step back, colliding off another passerby who grunted at her. The cops were staring at her and at each other.

If they were with the men who’d done it, she’d have given nothing away. If they weren’t, they might check it out just in case.

And she realised her mistake. The cops would already have been called by the neighbours who’d heard the gunfire in the apartment. They’d be on their way, or there already, turning the place into a crime scene.

All Nina had done was make herself a suspect.

She turned and plunged into the jostling, scuffling crowd once more, trailing the cops’ confused shouts behind her.

*

Nina ran on, with no destination in mind, wanting only to be alone.

She’d been different, or at least had first realised she was different, at the age of around twelve or thirteen. It wasn’t long after her first period, when all kinds of weird stuff started happening to her: she grew, she spread out, she had bizarre and exciting dreams and thoughts.

And the voices had begun. Two of them, a man’s and a woman’s, both strangers. Sometimes they occurred together, sometimes one or the other on its own. Sometimes they spoke to her, but more often they spoke about her, again either to one another or as though commenting on her like a narrator at the beginning of a movie.

She assumed this was a normal part of puberty, and when she and a bunch of girlfriends at high school had been sitting around discussing boys and periods, she’d mentioned it. The others had stared at her, laughed at first, then edged away: not immediately but gradually, over weeks, until she was alone.

She didn’t speak to her grandmother about it. The family doctor was friendly and caring, and a woman herself, but although Nina booked an appointment with her she chickened out at the last moment and said to the doctor’s kind gaze that she was suffering cramps, which was true enough.

The first person she told was, in the end, her grandmother. But that was later, when she was eighteen and getting ready for college, and could take care of herself. Her grandma was horrified, not by what Nina was telling her but because Nina hadn’t told her before. She assured her grandma that the voices came only when she was stressed, like around exam time; that she could cope with them now that she’d learned they couldn’t hurt her; and that she didn’t need meds. In fact, she was only telling her grandma to prove to herself how confident she felt about having them under control.

But the voices, she came to realise, were only the latest manifestation of the problem. The Watchers had been there earlier. From when she was ten, possibly even before. They’d been at the dark crack of her door in the middle of the night, when the house was in darkness. She’d huddled against the headboard of her bed, the duvet crammed up against her mouth to stifle her screams, while the watcher, or watchers, had stood beyond the doorway in the blackness, staring at her. She’d never seen them, never heard or smelled them. But they’d been there, so vividly that she had told her mother about them.

Her mother had looked grave and had listened carefully, then had gone off to find her dad. When she came back, she held Nina close and whispered against her hair: ‘There’s nobody out there, baby. I’ve checked. I’ve checked with your father.’

It was only later that she realised what an odd comment that was. I’ve checked with your father. But of course, later she had the advantage of hindsight.

And now she had proof that there was indeed somebody out here. More than one person.

They were coming for her. And they were prepared to kill to get to her.

*

She’d been running for a half hour at least, doing crazy loops, seeing familiar landmarks repeat themselves around her. By now the intensity of the crowds around her had diminished: they were no longer staring at her but seemed instead to be deliberately, smirkingly avoiding looking at her. Nowhere did she encounter a man in a suit bearing down on her, or a uniformed cohort boxing her in.

She found herself in control enough to be able to take an inventory. She had her clothes: jeans, T-shirt, jacket (which she’d kept on at Rachel’s apartment — Rachel had offered to take it for her but she’d felt protected in it to some extent, as though swaddled). She had her violin, its weight on her back reassuring as ever. And — thank God — she had her wallet. Nina didn’t use a handbag, to her friends’ amusement. She kept her wallet in her hip pocket at all times, believing it to be less vulnerable to robbers than if it were in a bag perched on her arm. Nor did she own a cell phone. They made it too difficult to be alone.

Other things were in her favour: she was physically intact, if shaken. The drop from the window hadn’t hobbled her as it might have. The voices hadn’t started up — yet — so that distraction wasn’t a problem. And she had the entire rest of the continental United States outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, in which to lose herself.

There were downsides. She was being pursued by a group of men, number unknown, who had murdered her friends when they tried to intervene, and who were either government agents or able to pass themselves off as such and therefore had considerable influence and possibly resources at their disposal. She was in a highly fragile state of mind. And she was alone.

She dared not head for the homes of any of the other few friends she had; Rachel’s and Kyle’s deaths were already her fault, and the understanding of this was yet to hit her fully. She had no surviving relatives, not now that her grandmother had passed. She couldn’t approach the police, because either they were in on it or they were seeking her in connection with her friends’ deaths.

Nina stopped dead. She was back on Main Street, the Mall ahead of her. Over to the left was the Greyhound bus station, though it wasn’t the sight of the familiar building that had made her pause.

What was she thinking? She did have a living relative after all.

The recollection both triggered a surge of hope within her and repelled her. She stood, balanced on the dilemma like a highrise act.

The footsteps came behind her, running; and although she had no idea if they were a follower’s or belonged to somebody incidental, she made her decision and strode towards the bus station.

Twelve

New York City

Monday 20 May, 2.15 pm

They closed in on Purkiss a minute or so after he’d presented his passport at the desk. A tall woman in a grey trouser suit with short, highlighted blonde hair, and a beefy Asian man, also besuited. They’d appeared out of nowhere.

‘Sir, you need to come with us.’ The woman spoke, her voice firm, confident. The man touched his elbow lightly.

Purkiss let them steer him between them away from the queue at passport control and down a side corridor. He was aware of the curious and thrilled stares prying at his back.

In a square room with walls painted an institutional pastel they sat him behind a table that was bolted to the floor. He half-expected to see an overflowing ashtray on it until he remembered New York was smoke free.

After the experience flying to Hamburg and in the airport afterwards, his senses had been tuned to fever pitch, both on the plane from Hamburg back to Heathrow and on the connecting flight to JFK. There’d been no-one suspicious, he was certain of it. If you excluded the wiry man with unshaven, sallow cheeks and dirty jeans across the aisle a few rows behind him. The man had sat through the entire seven-hour flight with headphones on, jaw working a piece of gum.

The woman pulled up a chair and sat across from Purkiss. The man remained standing, his hands in his pockets, his head lowered.

Purkiss didn’t feign outrage, or the normal nervousness a civilian would feel when pulled aside by what was obviously a pair of federal agents. He held the woman’s gaze, calmly, without challenge. She studied his face.

‘Mr Purkiss, I’m Special Agent Berg. This is Special Agent Nakamura. Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

Purkiss said nothing.

She drew a tablet computer from her bag and touched the screen. ‘John Purkiss. Secret Intelligence Service.’ She turned the tablet to show him his mug shot.

So that was it. He was on the database from back when he’d been a Service agent, and his appearance at Immigration had tripped their radar.

‘I used to be. I no longer work for them.’

This was both true and untrue. Technically he was employed solely by Vale, who was registered as a limited company. But Vale was funded at least in part by the Service. Purkiss suspected the Home Office contributed as well.

She gave him a deadpan look of utter scepticism. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Check with London, if you like, or with the embassy here in New York. I left the Service in 2008.’

Behind her shoulder Nakamura gave a tiny snort. Purkiss ignored him.

Berg said: ‘In which case, Mr Purkiss, what’s your business in the United States?’

‘Road trip.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I intend to rent a car and take a trip across country. Explore the mythic American landscape. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but I never got a chance when I was with the Service.’

‘Jack Kerouac.’ This from the other agent.

‘If you like. Not following in Kerouac’s footsteps, though. I just want to go where the road takes me.’

It was an absurd story. Purkiss didn’t blame them for what they were doing. A foreign spook on your turf… their suspiciousness was natural. But he felt irritated and frustrated; this was something he should have anticipated. At worst, they’d make up some excuse and deport him, Vale would smooth things over, and he’d return. But probably in a day or two’s time, at the earliest, and by then Pope would be even further out of reach than he was now.

‘You’re here how long?’ Berg.

‘Ninety days. Just like anyone else. Then I’ll be heading back. I’m not looking to immigrate.’

They watched him. He had time, so he looked back levelly. At Berg, not Nakamura. He suspected the man was going to start cutting up rough in a moment and he wanted to give the impression he wasn’t prepared for him. If he maintained eye contact with him he’d betray his intentions.

After a full twenty seconds Purkiss said: ‘How long is this going to go on for?’

‘Why?’ Nakamura spoke up. ‘Got someplace you need to be?’

Purkiss raised his palms. ‘Getting hungry, that’s all. And I don’t know if you’re going to wait till I confess to being on some mission in your country. If so, we’ll be here a long time. Forever, actually.’

The two agents didn’t look at each other but something passed between them, invisible communication that ends to develop between working cops paired together for several years. Purkiss began to wonder. Had they got anything else on him? Had they somehow linked him to the killings in Amsterdam or here in New York? It didn’t make sense. If anyone had connected him with the investigation into the killings it would be the CIA. And they’d hardly share the intelligence with the FBI, even though it was properly the Feds’ business if somebody linked to a crime against American citizens arrived on US soil. The rivalry between the two agencies was too great for that.

Berg said, ‘Where do you intend to head after this?’

Purkiss shrugged. ‘I was going to take a cheap hotel in Manhattan. Greenwich Village, maybe. Soak up the city for a day or two, while I make some plans. Then head west.’ He closed his eyes for a second, sighed. ‘Look. I know how you feel. I’m unwanted here. But seriously, I’m on holiday. I’m no threat to you or your country. If you’re going to deport me, please call London first. They’ll vouch for me. And they’re not going to lie to you, not about this.’ He was telling the truth. London was cosying up to the newly reelected President with renewed vigour, and wouldn’t want to scupper things. It was one of the reasons Pope’s responsibility for the killings couldn’t be shared with the Company.

Berg glanced back at Nakamura, who nodded. Purkiss realised for the first time that they were on a more-or-less equal footing, though he’d assumed before that Berg was the senior partner. She stood, stepped towards Nakamura and conferred with him in murmurs.

Nakamura rolled his eyes. Berg turned back to Purkiss and said, ‘Okay. You can go.’

‘That’s it?’ He rose.

‘Go. I won’t even warn you what’ll happen if you’re caught doing anything wrong.’ Her face was suddenly in his personal space. ‘And I mean anything. A parking violation. Public spitting. Jaywalking.’

‘Understood.’

He picked up his holdall — they hadn’t searched it; hadn’t had probable cause — and followed Nakamura back down the corridor into the main concourse. Taking a moment to orientate himself, he headed towards the duty channels.

Once, he glanced back, and saw the two agents standing together, Nakamura half a head shorter than Berg. They were watching him.

*

Purkiss rode the escalator towards a ceiling-high clear glass wall, the exit to the subway system beyond it. At the top, the scruffy gum-chewing man from the plane was loitering. Purkiss ignored him and walked past, turning towards the subway entrance.

An hour later, having roved back and forth between Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan on a subway system he found just as Byzantine as ever, he emerged at Whitehall Street. The early afternoon spring heat was more acute than it had been in Amsterdam and Hamburg and even London, and he felt the prickle of sweat at his shirt collar.

He was fairly confident he hadn’t been followed. Perhaps eighty per cent.

Purkiss thumbed a text message into his phone as he walked. Battery Park in ten minutes. Before entering the subway he’d sent another: I’m going to wander for a while. Head to Manhattan and stay above ground near the southern tip.

For a few minutes, with the salt breeze coming in from the harbour and the sky deep blue with the merest streak of cloud overhead, Purkiss allowed himself to enjoy the moment. Behind him the city towered, compact yet vast. He’d been there twice before, once as a student and again six years ago with Claire, the cityscape changed forever in between by the attacks on the Twin Towers.

Battery Park was strewn with office workers taking late lunch breaks, mothers with baby buggies, and tourists. Purkiss consulted a legend on a signpost and set off deeper into the park. Of all places in New York to choose for a meeting of espions, he thought, there couldn’t have been a more cliched one. It was like Waterloo Bridge or the Brandenburg Gate.

The man was alone on a bench, scattering the dregs from a paper bag to the assortment of pigeons and other birds strutting around his feet. Thirties, average size, fair hair. Purkiss sat beside him as though glad to rest his feet and said, ‘Catching the weather while it lasts.’

The other man said: ‘Storms by tomorrow morning, they reckon.’

The parole and countersign over, they sat in silence for ten seconds. Purkiss surveyed the lawn in front of him, the path stretching to either side. Nobody obvious.

He said, ‘So. Tell me.’

The other man — Vale had said his name was Delatour — glanced directly at Purkiss. It was less obvious than if he’d muttered from the side of his mouth. ‘I believe we have visual confirmation of Pope’s entry into the United States via JFK approximately two hours before the killing.’

He held up a smartphone, one of the larger brands that was almost a tablet computer. On the screen was a captured image from a black-and-white surveillance camera, taken from above and to the left of the same passport control area Purkiss himself had been stopped at earlier. Delatour tapped the screen to zoom in. Standing patiently in line was Pope. The image wasn’t in perfect focus but it was sharp enough.

‘I’ve checked the passenger manifest,’ said Delatour. ‘He was travelling under the name of Brian Sopwith.’

It made no difference. It was an alias he wouldn’t have used before, and wouldn’t use again. Purkiss gazed at a dog sprinting after a squirrel, its hapless owner in tow.

Delatour was Service, working out of the British Embassy. He was one of Vale’s contacts in the city and had both first notified Vale of Grosvenor’s murder and agreed to help with confirmation that Pope was responsible, as if there’d been much doubt otherwise.

The problem with New York, as Purkiss well knew, was that unlike Amsterdam or Hamburg or any of the big European cities, the Service couldn’t simply monitor CIA signals and operations. It was the Company’s home turf, and that meant foreign services were constantly on the back foot. Delatour had no leads on Grosvenor or many other Company operatives in the city, no access into their operations. And therefore no leads as to Grosvenor’s possible connection with Pope.

Nonetheless, Delatour touched the screen and another picture appeared. A mild-looking woman with dark, bobbed hair, in her late fifties or thereabouts.

‘Sylvia Grosvenor,’ he said. ‘Mostly winding down in her career, as far as we can tell. Passed over for promotion once too often, and by now too old to make it back up the greasy pole. Probably embittered. Still active, often out of the city. That’s what our sources have gleaned, anyway.’

‘Anything on her operations?’

Delatour took back the smartphone. ‘Virtually nothing. Some low-level work in Canada and in North Africa over the last twenty years, mainly looking at Islamist groups. Nothing spectacular, nothing to bring her to anybody’s attention.’

Purkiss’s own phone buzzed in his pocket. He fished it out. A text mesage read: You’re clean, far as I can tell. Bit difficult to tell about those trees straight in front of you. I’ve got wheels if you need them.

He put the phone away, scanning the treeline ahead. The foliage was dense with spring bloom, and yes, it was possible somebody was lurking there, but he couldn’t tell.

To Delatour he said, ‘What about extracurricular activities?’

‘Grosvenor? Again, not much. Single. Occasionally men round, but nothing serious.’

‘Any evidence of black ops links? Unofficial missions?’

‘No.’

Damn it, though Purkiss. Three dead agents with almost nothing to connect them. There was no evidence that Grosvenor had even known Taylor or Jablonsky.

He said: ‘Any chance you could get her financial records?’

‘Not much. They’re pretty tight on security over here when it comes to that sort of thing. A Company person would be exceptionally so. You’d need the FBI to get access to that sort of stuff, andeven they’d struggle.’ Purkiss was aware Delatour was watching him. ‘What have you got in mind?’

‘Money links people, more often that not. It’s a long shot, but it would be worth pursuing.’

Was that a glint in the trees, now? Brilliant early afternoon sun flashing off metal? Purkiss took out his phone again, thumbed in a text: You may have a point about those trees. Any chance you could get on the other side?

The reply came immediately. I’m on it.

Purkiss stood, stretched. Delatour rose after a moment.

‘Is there anything else I can provide?’

‘I don’t think so. Thanks for your help.’

‘Such as it’s been.’ The man looked embarrassed.

Purkiss said, ‘It’s a start.’

He manoeuvred so that he was facing the copse of trees, fifty yards away, and Delatour had his back to it. Purkiss held out his hand to shake, murmured, ‘Don’t turn round. There’s somebody watching us from those trees behind you.’

Delatour’s eyes held steady. He said: ‘Numbers?’

‘I don’t know. Light on metal or glass.’

Delatour stiffened. It could mean a camera, binoculars, or a firearm.

Purkiss said: ‘I’ve got a colleague here in the park. He’s going to be watching from the other side. We need to split up and walk away in opposite directions. You head out of the park. I’m going to head for the esplanade. Whoever it is, and however they got here — whether they followed me or you — it’s me they’ll be interested in.’

Delatour nodded with his eyes and began walking back along the pathway towards the entrance to the park through which Purkiss had come in. Breathing deeply, Purkiss strode south, towards the esplanade and its glitter of water beyond.

He still held his phone in his hand and when it vibrated he glanced at it.

Definitely a man in there. Just watching, I think, but he’s holding some sort of device. Doesn’t look like a rifle.

Binoculars? Some kind of long-distance audio device? Purkiss typed back: Got a visual on me?

Yes.

Purkiss fitted an earbud and plugged the end into the phone. He speed-dialled.

Immediately Kendrick answered: ‘Got you.’

Ahead the esplanade stretched left to right, the harbour beyond. Purkiss reached it and turned right, walking parallel to the railing with its intermittent punctuation of old-fashioned lamps.

In his ear Kendrick said, ‘One of them. He’s coming out of the trees, heading in your direction but a bit ahead. Dark suit, dark curly hair.’

So whoever it was intended to head him off. That meant there was probably somebody else behind him.

He was in full view of the thin crowd wandering up and down the esplanade. If they made a move it would need to be a subtle one.

Purkiss stopped and stood with his hands braced on the railing, and waited.

Thirteen

Outside Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 9.25 pm

Nina pressed her head against the cold, grimy glass of the window. The streetlights were become fewer and further between now that the Greyhound was leaving the confines of the city and its suburbs. High above, a pale rind of moon emerged intermittently between thin clouds.

She clutched her violin to her, something she did for comfort without risking looking like a child. Nobody on the bus could be trusted, of course; but although she’d attracted a few glances on embarking, none of the other passengers seemed to be looking at her now. She’d had to wait at the station for the booking office to open at eight thirty, and every time somebody had come in she’d recoiled, the shock of fear jolting her.

She was headed for Washington.

Nina didn’t know quite what it was that her father did, hadn’t kept in touch even as far as Googling his name to find out about him; but she knew he did something in the Federal government, that he was a man of some importance and influence, and that he therefore probably worked and lived in the nation’s capital. She’d set about finding his exact location once she was there and had access to an internet café. If she’d had a cell phone, she’d have been able to start the search already and save time. But then they’d have caught her already.

She hadn’t seen her father since she was eleven. Fifteen years. His face was still clear in her mind, and she doubted he’d have changed enough to be unrecognisable. Whether he’d recognise her, a child grown into a woman, was another matter.

Nina didn’t want to sleep, but she let her eyes close and plunged into memory.

*

‘Nina, baby, where are you?’

Her mother’s voice is distant as an echo, even though it comes from upstairs. Far louder, and clearer, is the scream when it comes.

She pads to the front door and opens it. It locks once closed and can’t be opened from outside without a key, but it’s a risk she’ll take. Her mother will be there to let her back in.

The scream comes again as she lets the door swing shut, as loud and as sudden as if it’s next to her ear. She flinches, putting up her hand. Can’t her mother hear it?

The driveway is washed in moonlight ahead of her. Her dad’s car squats off to one side. Nina touches the hood: it’s warm. He hasn’t been home long.

Except he isn’t home.

At the end of the driveway she finds the electronic gate shut. She clambers over easily and drops into the dirt on the other side, scuffing her knees. It doesn’t hurt; she’s done it before.

Across the cracked tarmac of the road, beyond its own gate, the Box sits blackly. There’s a glow from it, as though a light somewhere inside is seeping through the walls.

The scream breaks loose again.

A rumble starts up from over to her right. Nina swings, terror clawing at her. A car’s coming down the road, one of the old Jeeps that’s always sitting outside the Box. The headlights are burning through the night.

Nina leaps towards the boulders at the side of the road and crouches behind them.

The Jeep slows at the gate and sits, growling, as the railed metal inches its way open. When there’s just enough room the Jeep squeezes through and stops next to the Box.

The moon’s behind the Box, not behind her, so Nina knows her head won’t be seen. She peers over the top of the boulder.

Far behind her, her mother’s voice calls her again.

Two men are jumping down from the Jeep, men in those khaki uniforms she’s always seeing around. She’s seen the men before but doesn’t know their names. One of them unhooks the door at the back of the jeep while the other one stands back, a long gun cradled in his arms.

Two other men have come out of the Box and help the first two drag a man form the back of the Jeep. He loses his balance and has to be held under his arms. Nina sees that his hands are tied behind his back. He’s making funny wet hissing noises but doesn’t talk. There’s something tied across his mouth, too.

The men in uniforms drag him across to the door of the Box. When they’re almost there he suddenly twists sideways and tries to run away. One of the men jabs the end of the gun into his back and he falls. They haul him up again and through the door.

Another scream, this one going on for ten seconds at least. Not from the new man, but from somebody else inside the Box.

Nina crawls into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. The moon’s suddenly terribly cold, like the sun in reverse.

‘Nina?’

Nina shrieks, scrambling around the boulder and losing her footing, sprawling in the dust. Then her mother is pulling her close, her warmth and smell swallowing her, whispering and sobbing into her hair.

‘Nina, oh, baby, my God, what have you seen, what are you doing here, oh Jesus, baby…’

*

Nina jerked upright, blinked around. The bus had stopped at a light, that was all. She glanced at her watch. Ten p.m.; they’d been travelling for just under an hour. She hadn’t dozed off after all.

Her head slumped back against the seat. That wasn’t the memory she’d been looking for; but it kept returning, unbidden, and she didn’t know why. She’d see worse, far worse. But that was the first time she’d seen her mother so scared for her. Terror and guilt: it was a combination that flavoured many of her recollections of her mother.

Once more she closed her eyes, but the memory she wanted, normally so richly infused with sensory associations, didn’t come. Instead, her father’s face kept appearing, as she’d seen it the day he’d told her of her mother’s death: square, the stubble blue on his chin even though it was noon and he’d shaved that morning, his mouth soft and with the beginnings of a smile as it always was, only his eyes telling her something wasn’t right. His face had splintered, the shards scattering, as she’d absorbed his words, even though she knew now that an eleven-year-old couldn’t really grasp what death meant.

‘The storm,’ he said. ‘It took Mama away.’

At first she thought he meant like in the Wizard of Oz, that her mother was in some faraway land doing battle with witches and flying monkeys. But as he spoke, his hands barely touching her shoulders, his arms straight out in front of him as he crouched before her, she began to understand. The storm had swept across the island, across the whole country — across a good part of the Western hemisphere, she now knew — and had taken her mother with it. Their home was gone. The Box was gone — and what of the people inside it, the ones who screamed?

In the past week there’d been frantic activity on the island, boxes being carted away by the Jeepload and extensive makeshift construction work as wood and steel was hammered down as reinforcement. Nina had watched and listened, bewildered, the feeling growing in her that none of the adults actually believed what they were doing was going to work. Sure enough, three days later her father had bundled her out of bed in the middle of the night and she’d found herself on a dream journey that involved a car and a roaring, shaking plane, before she’d woken shivering and terrified in her grandmother’s bed.

Her father came to her after two days, with the news that their home was lost, and so was her mother.

*

And now, almost a decade and a half later, she was on a night bus from Charlottesville, VA to Washington D.C., fleeing men in suits who were at the same time authority figures and the murderers of her friends, in search of the only person who could help her. Her father, whose whereabouts she didn’t, if she was honest, have a clue about; who had been out of her life for more than half of it; and whom she had learned to hate.

Fourteen

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 9.05 pm

Over the years Pope had mastered the art of stillness; of waiting absolutely silently and ignoring the clamour of hunger and other more pressing bodily requirements.

After four hours in the girl’s flat he decided to use the lavatory.

Immediately afterwards his ears strained for tell-tale signs that somebody was already in the flat and had reacted. But there were none. Satisfied again that he was alone, he went back to wait on the living room sofa in the dark.

He flexed the muscles in his arms and calves and thighs minutely to keep the blood flowing. The distorted Dali clock on the wall said it was nine p.m. He’d arrived in Charlottesville on the Amtrak train at four, and had found the flat within half an hour. Entry had posed no problem. He hadn’t expected her to be at home on a Monday afternoon, and he was right. On arrival he did a quick prowl around the flat, familiarising himself with the layout and trying to determine if anyone else lived there.

Nina Ramirez seemed to live alone. There was no tract of any male presence, no man’s clothes in the wardrobe or shaving kit in the bathroom. Nor were there any signs that she shared with a woman friend. The bedroom was a single one.

The decorations were few: framed photographs of a woman in her thirties with a child of ten or so, whom Pope knew were Ramirez and her mother; considerably more of an older woman who resembled both of the other two. The grandmother. Ramirez had lived with her from childhood and through college, Pope knew.

Of her father there were no pictures.

Most of what passed for ornamentation in the flat was related to music. There were coffee-table tomes on the great violinists, on the history of the instrument itself. Two framed prints on the walls were facsimiles of yellowing musical scores: Paganini, Khachaturian. A wall-mounted unit revealed an array of CDs and DVDs, almost all of classical recordings.

At nine twenty he saw the first flicker of blue and red lights across the wall opposite the main bay window.

Quickly he moved at a crouch to the window and peered out. Police black-and-whites were pulling up, four of them.

Without stopping to consider what this meant he strode across the room. The tiny bathroom was at the rear of the flat. He stood on the toilet lid and pushed open the window as far as it would go. An alley behind the flat stretched away for ten yards and then bent to the left.

Pope dragged himself through the window, snagging his belt buckle for one moment before tearing free. The apartment was on the second floor — an American would say the first — and the drop was an easy one.

After putting two blocks between himself and the flat he doubled back by another route until he had a vantage point of the front of the complex. There was no doorman, just a simple keycode entry system. Four uniformed cops milled about on the pavement at the front. It meant four had gone inside, probably, and they were expecting her to make a run for it.

He took a few seconds to absorb this new information and try to process it. Nothing came up. There was no way anyone could have known he was heading here. Purkiss himself couldn’t possibly have worked out the connection yet, not without supernatural powers of some kind.

When the lights came on at the second-floor windows he knew it was Ramirez’s flat they’d come to visit.

He debated waiting but decided nothing would come of it. At most he’d see a group of police officers emerge in a few minutes’ time with nothing to show for their search. Pope turned away and began walking, pondering his next move.

He knew a lot about the girl, but nothing about her friends in the city. He did know she hadn’t gone away: there were signs of recent habitation in the flat, such as dishes unwashed on the kitchen surface. So presumably she was in the city somewhere. Where precisely, he had no way of knowing.

Pope had the grandmother’s old address but that was unlikely to be of much use; he knew the house had been sold since her death. He knew also that the girl was a musician and therefore presumably had musical friends and acquaintances, but again finding them was going to be difficult.

He’d never been to Charlottesville before but had learned a little of the basic layout, and headed towards Main Street and the Mall. It was a picturesque city, he noted distantly, with a lively atmosphere even on a Monday evening.

As often happened, he ran a segment of the diary through his head to occupy his thoughts while the rest of his mind worked on the problem of what to do next.

18th October

Signs are that the hurricane is going to hit us in a week or so. Z is getting nervous — once more, he handles his tension well, but he can’t conceal it completely. He’s started “precautionary measures”, as he calls them. It’s not quite an evacuation, yet, but the beginnings of one. Little of the equipment has been moved, and the storm shutters are being hammered into place with admirable speed. But nobody here really believes the operation is going to be able to continue after the storm hits, even if the Box isn’t completely destroyed. For one thing, relief ships and aircraft are going to be prowling the area and the likelihood of discovery will be enormous.

Still the subjects — prisoners, let’s call them that and have done with it — continue to come in, sometimes in a trickle, at other times en masse. It’s almost as though Z is desperate having come this far to process as many as he can before everything ends. I don’t know quite what’s driving him. The results so far have been clear. Caliban is a failure. Or, at least, the result has been a negative one, which is not quite the same thing. But given what’s gone into the project, with regard to manpower and secrecy, an outcome like this is nothing less than disappointing.

The core people, Jablonsky and Taylor and Grosvenor and of course Z himself, are still here. Around thirty per cent of the support personnel remain, including the three medics. I haven’t learned their names. They’re guilty, of course, but they’re small fry and can be mopped up afterwards. The other four names are the important ones.

20 th October

Another evening talking with Z. If he’s been tainted by Taylor’s suspicions of me, he’s hiding it well. Alone with me he makes less of an effort to disguise the tension he’s experiencing. He doesn’t talk about the approaching storm much, though. Instead he speaks of Caliban as if it’s still a going concern, a project that’s far from over let alone dead in the water.

He’s deeply preoccupied with the science of it. ‘It’s the serotonin that’s doing it,’ he says. ‘The deaths. We’re overloading them with it. Probably the norepinephrine, too. The corticosteroids were contributing, but the content has been reduced and although we’ve had a reduction in mortality since then, it’s still unacceptably high.’

We’re in the mess, seated at one of the tables. There’s coffee in a pot on the hotplate. No booze. Z doesn’t drink. The others do, but not him. His face is waxy pale in the fluorescent light from above. Even if the storm leaves the Box intact, it’s going to take out the generators and that’ll be it. No power, no more project.

‘Autopsies,’ he says. ‘God damn it, we need them. And we don’t have them.’

None of the doctors involved were pathologists. W hadn’t recruited any beforehand. Any deaths that were to occur would probably be the result of excessively forceful restraint, suicide, or escape attempts. So the thinking went. Nobody had anticipated a significant mortality rate from the drug itself.

While I watch Z’s eyes — he has a habit of looking away while he’s talking, like many people — I’m thinking. I need to make a move, imminently. If I wait until the storm hits, I might not survive, or at the very least it may be too late to provide any proof of what’s happened here. I know now that I’m unlikely to catch the big one, discover who the connection high up in Washington or the corporate world is. But that doesn’t matter now.

I’m going to dictate this diary over the next twenty-four hours, every word of it that I’ve kept in my head. A backup copy, in case I disappear.

*

It was an idea. Not the most brilliant one, but better than anything else he could come up with.

Pope found a payphone and dialled enquiries. To his surprise, the girl’s number was listed. The phone rang twice before it was answered.

The voice was cautious, a man’s. ‘Yes?’

‘Oh.’ Pope put surprise and mild dismay in his tone. ‘Is, ah, is Nina there?’

‘Who’s speaking?’

‘I’m a friend.’ He let a touch of belligerence creep in. ‘Who’re you?’

Silence for a beat. Then: ‘Sir, this is the police. Could you please identify yourself?’

‘The police? What’s — is Nina okay?’

‘Kindly identify yourself.’

‘My name is Thomas Beaumont. Like I say, I’m a friend. What’s going on?’

‘Were you expecting Ms Ramirez at home?’

‘Yes, that’s why I rang.’ Pope cursed himself silently. An American would say called, not rang. ‘Officer, please can you tell me what — ’

‘When did you last see Ms Ramirez?’

‘Two days ago? No, three. Friday night. A bunch of us went out for drinks.’

‘And your connection with Ms Ramirez is what, again, exactly?’

Pope thought about the musical paraphernalia in the flat. ‘We’re in the same music group. She plays violin.’ He raised his voice a fraction. ‘Has something happened to her?’

‘Mr Beaumont, she’s believed to have fled a murder scene.’

‘What? Nina?’

‘We don’t think she’s responsible. But we need to speak to her.’

‘Who’s been murdered?’ Pope didn’t expect an answer; he’d said it to buy time while he tried to process what the cop had said.

‘I’m not at liberty to disclose that, Mr Beaumont.’ The cop muttered something to someone in the background, then came back. ‘Sir, two things. One, do you have Ms Ramirez’s cell phone number?’

‘She doesn’t give it out to many people. Only those she’s closest to.’ A trace of bitterness. It explained at least why he was ringing her home number.

‘Okay. Second, we need to ask you some questions. Where are you right now?’

Pope twisted round to peer at the signs. Making up a fictional location wouldn’t work. ‘Corner of West Main and, uh, Fifth.’

‘Stay there. A squad car will pick you up.’

Pope hung up, stepped out of the booth and began walking rapidly, putting space between himself and the corner.

It didn’t make sense. Conceivably, it was a coincidence. He had little idea what Ramirez was like as a person. She might hang out with a druggy or gangbanger crowd, and they might have been partying tonight and lost control. Except he did have an idea what Ramirez was like. She was a graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in music, and a violinist. Her flat hadn’t looked like a drug den in the slightest.

No. The murder scene she’d fled had something to do with his presence here. He had no idea what. And there was little point speculating at the moment, because he needed to focus on the consequences.

She was on the run from the police. That meant she’d either gone to ground with friends somewhere, or left the city. He knew Charlottesville had a population of under 45,000 souls. And people like her, of Hispanic ethnicity, were in a tiny minority compared with African-Americans and whites.

If it were him, he’d have left the city behind.

There was the airport, but it was eight miles away and the police would have sent a description of her there already. She might have taken a car, either her own or a rental, in which case he had no chance of finding her in time, even if he somehow managed to discover her licence plate number or the rental agency she’d used.

That left public transport. A train, or that icon of American intercity travel: the Greyhound.

He remembered that the station he’d arrived at by train doubled as a bus station, and was a little further up Main.

Fifteen

Langley, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 3.25 pm

Naomi came in without knocking and stood across the desk from Giordano, hand poised and holding a sheet of paper. He took the hint and dug a gap between the piles of articles and memoranda. Never a tidy man, Giordano had let his desk come to resemble one of those recycling bins Adrienne was always encouraging him to use for their waste.

He peered through his glasses at the printout Naomi dropped in front of him. It showed a copy of a passport’s photo page with name, date of birth and the usual other data.

John Purkiss. The face gazed back affably, the hair dark, the cheeks a little shadowed.

Giordano raised his eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’

‘British SIS. Arrived JFK from London at two this afternoon, alone as far as we can tell. The Feds took him in for a little light questioning. Let him go after ten minutes.’

‘Today…’

‘Yes sir.’ She meant that she understood the potential significance of the timing. Known foreign agents came and went all the time. This one had arrived sixteen hours after a Company operative had been murdered, in the same city.

‘Any idea where he is now?’

‘No sir. This info came through just a minute ago.’ It was now three-thirty p.m. Naomi looked genuinely sorry. ‘Our ears in the British Embassy are on alert, of course, in case he goes there.’

‘All right.’ He gave the little wave that so many people found annoying: run along now.

In a moment he looked up. ‘What?’

‘Boss, why would the FBI question him?’

Giordano considered, tonguing lunch chicken out of a tooth. ‘Like you said, it was over in ten minutes. They probably just wanted to put the frighteners on him, let him know they were on to his presence in the city. Who understands the arcane workings of the Feeb mind? I didn’t say that, by the way.’

When she’d gone, Giordano took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Naomi was right. The Feds, even the paranoid New York ones, didn’t normally routinely haul in foreign spooks for a pep talk, least of all British ones. The Brits were our buddies again, after all, as the President kept saying now that he’d got the reelection business over and could concentrate on establishing his international legacy.

The FBI people had collared Purkiss for a reason. Probably they hadn’t got much from him and were tailing him even now.

Which meant they knew why he was here.

Giordano debated getting up and walking the ten yards or so after Naomi to call her back. Instead he picked up the phone and heard it ringing in her office down the corridor. She answered it in a rush.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Another word?’

When she’d come back, he said: ‘Find out who the Feds were that spoke to Purkiss. Give the job to Kenny if you like.’

‘That’s okay, boss. I’ll do it.’ She beamed, vindicated. ‘Want me to have them put under surveillance?’

‘No, I want you to have them terminated with extreme prejudice.’ After a full five seconds he laughed at her expression. ‘Good God, girl. Too many Jason Bourne movies on your TiVo. Just their names is fine. If I need to speak with them I’ll make a couple of calls myself.’ He placed the glasses back on his nose like a pair of pince-nez. ‘And may I remind you, Agent, that the Central Intelligence Agency is forbidden by federal law from conducting surveillance activities on US soil.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

One of these days, he thought, she was going to put her tongue out at him. He let them run rings around him like a big teddybear of an uncle.

*

Giordano called Adrienne, something he often did when under pressure. Just the sound of her calm, no-bullshit tone was enough to both ease and lift his spirits. He told her it was ‘staff trouble’ he was having, which was as much as he could reveal. After he’d offloaded, she in turn told him about the difficult conversation she’d had with her son Adam, Giordano’s stepson. The boy was a grad student in business at Columbia who was talking about jacking it all in and becoming an aid worker in Somalia. Adrienne was disappointed but supportive of her son. Giordano thought he was nuts, and had told both him and Adrienne as much. Adam now referred to his stepfather as “that fascist”. Resorting to the F word put you beyond the bounds of rational debate, in Giordano’s opinion.

He wondered not for the first time what his and Adrienne’s own kids would have been like, if they’d met ten years earlier and had had any. It might have been an attractive combination: her warmth and people skills with his analytical mind and drive. On the other hand, he thought, surveying his desk, they might have ended up overweight slobs like him with the added handicap of their mom’s driving abilities.

After the call he sat with the phone in his hands. He was kidding himself. The call to Adrienne had been a distraction, a way of stalling.

This Purkiss. Not Grosvenor’s killer, because he’d arrived the day after her murder. Did he have an accomplice? It was the only explanation that made sense.

Giordano heaved himself over the desk, picked up the phone.

.

Sixteen

New York City

Monday 20 May, 4.05 pm

The trick, Purkiss had learned, was to fix on a distant point and allow it to dwindle so that it became a pinpoint, then to focus your vision on it so intently that the rest of the visual field seemed to expand around it.

He chose the Statue of Liberty. The green figure, so familiar even to those who hadn’t seen it, stretched skywards over to his left. It drew his gaze and held it.

The movement from his left was both seen and felt. At the same time, his heightened awareness told him something was happening behind him and on his right.

Two men approaching. At least.

Purkiss did what would be least expected and instead of turning one way or the other, stepped backwards and rightwards. He collided with the man just as the one on the left moved fully into view, and brought his elbow round as he did so. He felt it collide with the solid bulk of a torso and heard a gasp.

The blow came so suddenly and unexpectedly that Purkiss didn’t even make an effort to parry it: a knuckle strike to the left side of his neck that seemed to punch all voluntary control from his body so that he was inhabiting it but unable to manipulate it in any way. He saw the railing rush towards him, the water tilting beyond; felt hands grab each arm and jerk him back before he collided with the rail; heard shrieks on either side along the esplanade. He was dropped to his knees, the hard concrete of the walkway biting through the material of his trouser legs, and lowered only fractionally more gently to the ground so that his face was turned sideways and through his swimming, roiling vision he identified a pair of tasselled loafers inches from his face.

His arms were jerked behind his back and he felt the ratcheting grind of cuffs being clamped shut around his wrists. Hands hauled him to a sitting position against the railing. He tipped sideways a little and vomited thinly. Around him people were backing away, in some cases running.

Above him, limned by the bright afternoon sun, stood two men. They kaleidoscoped in and out of focus but he made out that one was white and curly-haired — the man Kendrick had identified earlier — and the other was African-American with a shaved head. Both wore dark suits and sunglasses. The black man was holding up some sort of ID, a badge in a leather casing. He brandished it from left to right for the benefit of the passersby, then pushed it towards Purkiss. Purkiss couldn’t make out the details, apart from the arching words Central Intelligence Agency.

He tried to speak but the words came out as a slurry of sounds unintelligible even to him. The men didn’t read him the familiar Miranda rights. When they seemed satisfied he wasn’t going to vomit again or pass out they seized his arms and pulled him upright once more. He swayed but kept his balance. One on either side of him, they began to march him back across the park.

*

He stumbled towards the entrance between the two men, the crowds peeling aside, their fascinated stares lingering. The men had done a brief, professional frisk but had left the phone in his pocket. It was useless to him there.

Beyond the park entrance, in the sudden shadow of the city once more, they reached a slate-grey Crown Victoria, a standard government issue car. The shaven-headed man pushed Purkiss’s head down into the back, slid in beside him. The curly-haired one got in the driver’s seat.

The car pulled away into the traffic. Both the men remained silent. They’d be armed; Purkiss had seen the bulge of shoulder holsters under their jackets.

They weren’t Company; or if they were, they were acting independently and beyond their remit. Beyond this, he knew nothing about them. He’d been seated behind the passenger seat, not the driver’s, so even if he could somehow contrive to bring his legs up he wouldn’t be able to get a stranglehold on the driver. In any case, the man next to him would react within a second.

The Crown Vic headed up a wide main thoroughfare along the western side of the island, the Jersey shore looming intermittently between the buildings across the water. At one point the man beside him murmured into a cell phone and Purkiss strained to hear; but the blow to his neck had knocked his hearing out of kilter and it hadn’t yet returned to normal.

The impact came from the left, a shocking fist into the side of the car that shunted it sideways into the next lane in a crump of buckling metal segueing into the screams of tyres and blaring horns. The man next to Purkiss was driven across the space between them as his door stove in; the driver himself was shoved sideways as the side airbag bloomed, usurping his space behind the wheel. A violent jolt followed as the car behind tailended the Crown Vic.

The shaven-headed man’s face was inches from Purkiss’s own and he took the chance, snapping his forehead forward into the bridge of the man’s nose. The man recoiled with a cry, blood gouting from his nostrils. He flailed, half-sliding down the seat, not unconscious but far from fully alert. Purkiss pressed his back against the door on his side and kicked out through the partition between the front seats, catching the driver in the side of the face with the tip of his shoe. The man was quick to pull back and avoided the full force of the kick. His right hand groped inside his jacket, the front of which was pressed against his body by the tumescent airbag.

Behind his back Purkiss’s cuffed hands scrabbled for the door release. His fingers found the lever, snapped at it; but the central locking system was in place. He wouldn’t get another kick in and the man’s arm was burrowing more deeply into his jacket. In a few seconds he’d have the gun.

Beside Purkiss’s ear the window exploded inwards, nuggets of safety glass hailing past his face. Some sort of small battering ram was knocking out the remaining fragments of the window. Once more hands were grabbing at his shoulders. He heaved himself forwards to allow them to reach under his arms, pressed downwards with his feet to help lever himself up and back. Awkwardly he half-pushed himself and was half-hauled through the window frame. For a moment he was horizontal, suspended crazily from the car; then the hands righted him and he stood blinking in the middle of a downtown Manhattan street, a cacophony of yells and horns raging around him.

‘Come on.’

Two people, once again, a man and a woman this time propelling him forwards and towards the pavement. Like the two men in the park they wielded shields in leather folders, held up like crucifixes against a crowd of vampires.

The FBI agents, Berg and Nakamura.

Berg dragged at the rear door of a Ford Taurus parked up on a yellow line on the pavement and said, ‘Get in.’ Behind her a man was approaching, running across the street, weaving among the stalled traffic.

Nakamura yelled, ‘Watch out,’ his arm coming up, a pistol levelled.

Purkiss said, ‘No, he’s with me.’

The man reached them. Thin, unkempt, with bad teeth and the sallow eyes of a wolf.

Berg stared at him, then back at Purkiss. Then she said: ‘In. Both of you.’

Purkiss dropped into the seat, shifting over to make room for Kendrick. Nakamura took the wheel.

*

The noise dwindled behind as they plunged into the bustle of Lower Manhattan. In the front passenger seat Berg took something from her pocket and handed it back.

‘The cuffs.’

It was a universal key, something Purkiss wasn’t surprised to see in the FBI arsenal. Kendrick took it and sprung the cuffs after a few seconds of fiddling. Purkiss rubbed the feeling back into his wrists.

He said: ‘Where are we going?’

Berg said, ‘Haven’t decided yet.’ She turned in her seat to look at him. ‘Those guys say who they were?’

‘No. They had CIA ID, though.’

‘Their names are Barker and Campbell. And yes, they’re Company, all right.’

‘Then why are we running away? Why not arrest them? Assuming they’ve done something arrestable, of course.’

Nakamura laughed. Berg said, ‘They’ve certainly done something arrestable. Apprehending a foreign national on US soil. That’s our jurisdiction, not theirs. The reason we’re not arresting them is because we’ve been warned off.’

‘By whom?’

‘Our own high command.’

Purkiss took a moment to absorb this, found that he couldn’t. He glanced at Kendrick. ‘Thanks.’

‘Any time you need your arse wiped.’

As soon as he’d seen Kendrick running across the street, Purkiss had grasped what had happened. Kendrick hadn’t been able to make a move in the park when he’d seen Purkiss being taken down by the two men. He’d followed the Crown Vic in his rental car and had rammed it at what seemed to be an opportune moment. And had turned out to be one.

He’d rung Kendrick from Hamburg as soon as Vale had told him about the New York killing of the third agent, Grosvenor. Kendrick had been available immediately, so Purkiss had booked him on the Heathrow-to-JFK flight that he himself would be connecting with. The US was a vast arena and Purkiss decided he’d do well with backup.

Tony Kendrick was an ex-paratrooper whom Purkiss had met in Iraq some eight years earlier. He was a civilian now. Purkiss hired him on a freelance basis when he needed an extra pair of hands, or an extra gun. There’d been three of them once: Purkiss, Kendrick and Abby.

A police car shot past, siren squealing. Purkiss thought he knew where it was heading.

Berg said: ‘We’ve got questions for each other. I’ll go first. We know you’re here on a job, Purkiss. No bullshit this time. We just can’t figure out what it is. Danny here and I — ’ she nodded at Nakamura — ‘were at JFK on another job, looking for a suspect in a different cae who we thought might turn up from abroad. While we were there we noticed those two CIA guys, Campbell and Barker, hanging round. We got curious. We knew them for Company, and then when you arrived at the passport desk and they took an obvious interest in you, we moved in. We’re jealous of our turf, Purkiss. The law’s clear. Here in the US, the Company butts out. And if the Company decides to start following people here, it becomes our business.

‘So we shook you down a little, didn’t get anything out of you as expected, then let you go. Campbell and Barker took off after you, so we followed. You’re good — you nearly lost them, and us — but we picked you up again on the subway and were on to you when you reached Battery Park.’

Nakamura took over: ‘You met up with some guy there, we don’t know who. Then we saw the two Company assholes take you down. We called in for authorisation to make a move. Berg’s idea. Big fuckin’ mistake. Our boss tells us to back off. Walk away. Says it’s an internal CIA matter. Like Berg says, we’re jealous of our turf. So we decide to ignore him. Next thing, this guy — ’ he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Kendrick — ‘comes out of nowhere and rams you. And we haul you out.’

‘And we’re officially in violation of direct orders from our superiors. A firing offence, at best.’ Berg shook her head, as if amazing herself. ‘So. Your turn. And Purkiss?’

‘Yes.’

‘Make it good. Because I am having a really bad day.’

Seventeen

Outside Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 11.10 pm

Pope had asked for the fastest car the rental firm had available, short of a sports vehicle. He’d chosen a Mercedes E-class saloon.

His preferred means of travel, the train, wasn’t an option because there were no more running that night. Neither could he take a bus, because speed was of the essence.

He veered through the snarl of North Virginia traffic, reaching interstate 95 within an hour. She had an hour’s head start on him. At this rate he would make Washington by midnight, around the time her Greyhound was due to arrive.

He’d done a quick scout of the station to see if she was there waiting for a bus or a train, then checked the schedules. No trains since this afternoon, so she wouldn’t have left that way.

At the bus station ticket office he said, ‘I’m looking for my girlfriend. I think she may have taken a bus this evening.’

The woman behind the screen eyed him with distaste. He smiled.

‘Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. She’s running away and I’m stalking her.’ He held up his phone. Onto it he’d loaded a photo of Ramirez for recognition purposes, one he’d taken in her flat. It showed her with her grandmother, grinning at the camera. He held the phone out, her photo showing on the screen. ‘Her phone. She’s left it behind. I think she went to Washington and she’ll be going insane knowing she’s left this behind. If she’s gone there, I need to catch up with her.’

The woman looked at the picture, then at him. She smiled back. Pope wondered if she’d need stitches.

‘Yeah, she was here. Bought a ticket for the nine o’clock ’Hound to Washington. Should be around one third of the way there now.’

He beamed. ‘Thanks so much.’

The rental place was down the road.

*

Pope wondered as he drove how the girl would react. She’d be terrified, no doubt. But someone who could keep their cool and escape from a murder scene with a purposeful journey in mind, someone who was a civilian and not accustomed to the sordid arts of death, had to have something about them that was tough. He had no fears that she’d be difficult to subdue or keep under control; but she might make life a little more difficult than he’d been expecting.

Of more concern to him now was the fact that there had been a murder or murders from which she’d had to flee. Either she’d killed somebody who’d been following her — unlikely, he thought — or someone else had got caught in the crossfire. Either way, it suggested some other party was pursing her. He couldn’t think of a reason at the moment, and it nagged at him.

There’d been one mention of her as a girl on the recording he’d listened to and committed to memory. He didn’t like to submerge himself in the remembered diary while he was driving, for obvious reasons, but he did want to explore that mention of her again. It would have to wait.

A flash of inspiration hit him, a thought so blindingly obvious that he was astonished at himself. He turned on the car radio. In an age when all news was assumed to be obtainable solely online, he’d forgotten about the tried and tested medium of local radio.

The stations were unfamiliar and he flicked through them at random. Loud rock music was followed by sickly country fiddles. A talk show host ranted, an evangelist roared. He settled on a quiet-sounding political debate programme and waited for the news broadcast.

It came after fifteen minutes. Police had been called to an apartment in Greenbrier, Charlottesville, after neighbours had reported sounds of a struggle and shots fired. Two individuals had been identified as having been shot dead, their names not yet released. The Charlottesville PD would like to speak to a Ms Nina Ramirez in connection with the shootings. A description followed.

Two people dead. She definitely hadn’t killed them. Friends, then, probably, who’d got in the way.

But in the way of whom?

*

He was on Interstate 95 passing the town of Dumfries when it happened.

The news had ended but he kept the radio on at a low volume, in case of updates. He’d been thinking about something else that had been bothering him but hadn’t risen to his full consciousness until now: why was she going to Washington, anyway?

The blacktop curved leftwards, the lights arcing through a light patina of drizzle on his windscreen. Traffic was still steady, but lighter than it had been nearer Charlottesville. He suspected it would begin to thicken as he neared the capital.

The bus was fifty yards ahead of him round the curve, stopped on the hard shoulder at a slant so that it blocked half of the outermost lane. Its hazard lights were flashing. Cars swerved irritably into the adjacent lane to avoid it. Even from a distance Pope recognised the Greyhound markings on the side visible to him.

He eased the brake down, slowing and at the same time shifting towards the hard shoulder.

A car was parked behind the bus, a nondescript saloon, its headlights on. The streetlights cast the bus’s windows into shadow so that Pope couldn’t detect any movement through them.

He stopped behind the car and killed the engine. Waited a moment, winding down the window to listen. All he could hear was road sounds: distant truck horns, cars steaming past through the thin rain.

Pope stepped out.

As he did so the hazard lights of the bus switched to a single blinking indicator and its exhaust billowed. With a rumble it pulled away on to the road.

Pope’s impulse was to dive back into his seat and fire the engine but a stronger instinct made him approach the car, his posture slightly stooped and loping. He peered in. There was nobody inside.

A yell hit his ear on the right. A man’s shout.

Pope straightened and stared in its direction. Beyond the safety rail on the side of the road, a bank sloped down into darkness. There was some kind of scrubby field below the Interstate, undeveloped land.

His night vision was still impaired by the brightness of the headlights he’d been facing for the last couple of hours; but if he couldn’t make out details, he could still see the outlines of the figures moving at a clip across the ground.

The one in front was a woman.

Pope vaulted over the railing and half slid, half scrambled down the slope.

Eighteen

Between Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington D.C.

Monday 20 May, 11.25 pm

An hour into the bus ride, Nina began to notice the car behind, and wonder if it was following her. Half an hour later she was convinced.

It was a dark grey sedan, with the Toyota symbol on the front. Nina didn’t know much about cars — didn’t drive, herself — so that exact make wasn’t clear. Sometimes it was right behind the Greyhound, sometimes it dropped back a car or two; but always it was there. When the bus driver put on an unaccustomed burst of speed and overtook a truck ahead of them, the Toyota followed suit and swung into place at their rear.

Nina couldn’t see through the windshield in the darkness. This wasn’t surprising, but the blackness of the glass seemed sinister, as though there was an added veil of secrecy about the vehicle.

Glad that she’d chosen the rearmost seat, she nonetheless felt nervous about turning and staring back through the window. Surely the occupants of the Toyota would see her waxen face peering through the glass at them? But then it didn’t matter; they knew she was on the bus, and whether she’d spotted them or not would be of no relevance.

A road sign loomed as the bus slowed temporarily: Washington D.C., 42 miles.

Nina made her decision.

Barely trusting her legs to support her, she wove to her feet, lifted the violin case and picked her way down the aisle towards the front, brushing newspapers and barging jutting elbows and knees. As she neared the bulging glass face of the bus she saw the driver’s eyes in the mirror, wide and wary. A crazy, he’d be thinking. He’d have had experience of them. Of the likes of her.

When she got close enough to make herself heard without violating his personal space, she said, low and shakily: ‘Please stop the bus. I need to get off.’

For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard, and she cleared her throat to repeat herself when he said, ‘Miss, I need you to sit down. Right now.’

His voice was low and warning, as though he’d had to deal with this kind of scenario before. She took a step back to show she wasn’t a threat, wasn’t going to seize the wheel from his hands.

‘There’s somebody following this bus. I need to get off.’

‘I said, you need to sit down. Or I’ll call for a police escort.’

The idea struck her that this might be a good idea, and she suppressed a laugh. Then she remembered that she couldn’t be sure the police weren’t in on it.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Stop the bus, let me off, and go on your way. I’ll be out of your hair.’

‘I’ll also be in breach of the rules.’ He was a tired-looking fifty. In profile she could see he hadn’t shaved since at least that morning. His expression said: I don’t need this.

Nina wavered, turning to look back down the aisle. The passengers nearest her were either asleep or lost in private worlds of sound embedded in their ears. One or two people gazed incuriously at her.

She considered wandering back to her seat. Then she thought of the headlights behind, picking out her silhouette against the rear window.

She hefted the violin case and leaned forward and muttered, as menacingly as she could manage: ‘I’ve got a gun. Stop the bus.’

In the mirror the man’s eyes darted to hers, then to the case. He huffed a laugh. ‘Honey, that’s a musical instrument.’

‘That’s what it looks like.’ She touched the end against the back of his neck. This time in his eyes she saw, not fear, but resignation. A genuine crazy. At least I’ll be able to say I was forced, get danger pay.

‘Jesus. All right, all right, don’t shoot.’ His eyes widened a fraction as though he wondered if he’d goaded her too far. He set the indicator flicking and slowed, peeling off on to the side of the highway. Horns flared past.

The doors hissed and concertinaed open. Nina said, ‘Thank you,’ and stepped down. The driver flinched away, as if she might take the opportunity now that the bus was stationary of doing him genuine violence.

She dropped out into the cold, wet night, not looking back, suddenly gripped with panic. A rail lined the curve of the roadside; beyond it was a slope and darkness. As she hoisted a leg across the rail she glanced back past the end of the bus.

The Toyota sedan had pulled in, lights still on. The doors were opening.

She stumbled on the other side of here rail, feeling stony uneven ground beneath her feet, and began to scramble down. Near the bottom she dropped to her knees and rolled, holding the violin case away from her. The wet grass cloyed at her, trying to snarl her limbs.

The slope levelled to dark, flat waste ground. Nina glanced back, saw two figures vaulting over the rail.

She began to run, the awareness hitting her with the force of a blow that she’d just made a stupid, terrible mistake.

*

The blackness into which she was flinging herself was deepened by the garish orange of the lights along the interstate behind her. Faintly in the distance, much higher than her, she could see a slope leading up to another road. Even if she made it up there, she’d have to be the fastest hitchhiker in history to get a ride before they caught up with her.

Nina hadn’t looked backwards since the first time, when she’d seen them crossing the rail. Two male figures, the details difficult to make out in the dark. Her ragged breathing and the scrabble of her sneakers on the rough ground blotted out all sound, so she couldn’t tell if they were still on the slope or inches behind her, reaching out for her even now…

The bus driver wouldn’t have driven straight off. He’d be phoning his superiors, the police, whoever, to report what had happened. A kind of hijacking, she guessed it was. Again, nobody would arrive in time to help her. She was on her own.

She thought of Rachel and Kyle, their bodies tossed around like dolls. They have guns. Oh God. Maybe they weren’t following her, but were simply taking aim. The image pitched her forward at a stoop, as if ducking would save her. But no shots came.

She saw the ditch a couple of seconds before she would have run straight over the edge, and flung herself sideways, unable to arrest her momentum entirely, landing on one knee. It yawned blackly, a gulf in the ground half-filled with stagnant sump water that could probably be jumped with a decent run-up, but she had no time for that now.

It was the end. Nina straightened to a crouch, dared to turn, holding her violin up before her as though its totemic power could offer her some protection.

The men were fifty yards back, following at an unhurried pace, striding rather than running. Two black silhouettes. It made sense: they didn’t need to run, she wasn’t going to be able to get away and it was far more effective to allow her to exhaust herself while they avoided the risk of twisting an ankle on the clumpy ground.

She began to sidle along the ditch, facing the men, keeping away from the edge. The men simply changed the angle of their approach so that they were heading straight for her again.

One called out, his voice carrying clearly though the drizzle: ‘Nina Ramirez. Don’t run. You’re safe with us.’

A laugh escaped the hand she’d clamped over her mouth. Safe. Yes. There was a certain security in death.

‘Come with us now. You’re in danger, but there’s someone looking out for you. We’ve been sent to take you to him.’

If she put enough distance between herself and them, she might — might — be able to run back to the Interstate. She’d be safer there, among the speeding cars and the lights. But she was stumbling sideways, less surefooted than they were, and they were easily closing on her.

As they drew nearer Nina could make out something of their features. One man was the tall, tanned one she’d seen in the campus pavilion that afternoon. The other — she thought — was the one who’d been watching her from the steps of the rotunda a few minutes before. A few hours ago, only, and her life, precarious at the best of times, had dropped off the edge.

The tanned man was the one who spoke. ‘Nina. Seriously. Stop running. Come with us. I swear to you, we mean you no harm.’

She felt a sudden emptiness behind her and her heart lurched as she realised the ditch had curved a fraction so that she’d almost sidled into it. She began moving sidelong away from the edge, back in the direction of the interstate. The men tacked sideways to follow.

Beyond them, blurred by the rain, another figure was visible, high on the slope.

The tanned man said: ‘We’re unarmed.’ He held his arms wide from his body, his palms open.

Behind him, the figure had broken into a run.

Nineteen

New York City

Monday 20 May, 6.10 pm

‘Wrong approach,’ Purkiss said.

They were clustered in a near-derelict office Nakamura had taken them to on the Upper West Side, with no air conditioning and the breeze of the Hudson River filtering through the cranked windows. There were a few chairs, a desk, a couple of cupboards with doors hanging off their hinges. Berg said it was FBI property awaiting useful employment.

She’d brought a laptop with her from the car and set it up on the desk, using a dongle to get web access. There was no question of using their usual Midtown office, she explained. Their boss had ordered them off the case, and they’d be noticed.

‘But accessing FBI facilities electronically will get you noticed, too,’ Purkiss pointed out.

Berg shook her head. ‘I’m not going in using my passcode.’

‘You’re hacking your own networks?’

Nakamura: ‘Sure. All of us do it from time to time. Usually it’s to modify records we’re not allowed to officially change.’

Berg hissed at him over her shoulder.

Kendrick lounged at the window, alternately paying mild attention to the group at the desk and gazing down at the street, tense and coiled as a cat. Purkiss stood behind the two agents, watching the screen as Berg’s fingers flashed over the keyboard.

After half an hour he turned away to pace.

‘Wrong approach, how?’ said Nakamura.

‘You’re looking for patterns. Patterns in these people’s movements, their behaviour. Ways and places and times they might have interacted.’

Berg had entered the names of Pope, Jablonsky, Taylor and Grosvenor into the database she’d accessed and the screen was scrolling though the links. None so far, other than the obvious one, namely that they were all recognised intelligence operatives, the first a British agent and the last three CIA. They’d visited some of the same locales but not at the same time, as far as was known. At thirty two Pope was the youngest; the Americans’ ages ranged from middle forties to late fifties.

‘And you’d go about it how exactly?’ Nakamura again.

‘Whatever their connection, it’s unlikely to be something overt, something that would find its way on to a database. The link’s going to be something more tenuous. Counterintuitive.’ Suddenly Purkiss remembered his conversation with the local Service man, Delatour, in the park. The bang on his head shortly afterwards must have done the equivalent of knocking the memory down the back of the sofa.

He said, ‘Finances. Can you check that on them? Investments, stock portfolios, that kind of thing?’

‘Hell yeah.’ Berg tuned back to the laptop and tapped away happily.

Purkiss left her for a moment and went over to Kendrick. ‘Any problems at the airport?’

‘Should there’ve been?’

‘Not really.’ Purkiss had been half-expecting Kendrick to get pulled out at the passport desk, but not because his face was on a database of known foreign operatives like Purkiss’s. In his dirty jeans and outsized camouflage jacket, and with his yellow pallor and khaki teeth, Kendrick looked like a drug addict.

‘First time in New York?’ said Purkiss.

‘Yeah,’ said Kendrick. ‘Done Disney in Florida before, though. Sean.’

Kendrick had a seven-year-old son from a long-defunct relationship. The boy’s mother had unhappily ceded fairly generous visiting rights. Purkiss preferred not to speculate as to why, or what pressure might have been brought to bear.

At the desk Berg called, ‘Got something.’ Purkiss walked back over, Kendrick in tow.

She nodded at the screen. ‘A match, kind of. All three Company people had stock portfolios. Not Pope, or if he does or did, there’s no record. Obviously there’s a lot of common companies they own shares in.’

Purkiss ran his eyes down the list. Software companies, health insurance providers, banks. Internationally recognised names.

‘But here’s the thing,’ Berg went on. ‘Grosvenor and Taylor both had significant shares in Holtzmann Solar. And I mean significant. More than half their portfolio, in both cases.’

Purkiss knew Holtzmann Solar, or at least the name. A pharmaceutical company, one of the heavy hitters if not quite in the top league in terms of turnover. Born in Zurich but with its global headquarters now right there in Manhattan, if he wasn’t mistaken.

‘How about Jablonsky?’

‘Not that I can see. Still, though. It’s a link.’

Purkiss thought for a moment. ‘Okay. How about searching for other Company operatives with similar investments.’

‘Done. Database is working on it right now.’

He’d told the two agents everything, back in the car: how he’d been summoned to Amsterdam because Pope’s name had been mentioned in the phone conversation between Jablonsky and Taylor; his walking in on Pope killing Jablonsky; the wild goose chase to Hamburg, including the surveillance at the airport by Americans. Berg had listened expressionlessly — Purkiss hadn’t been able to see Nakamura’s face as he was driving — but she’d glanced across at her partner, once, and Purkiss had understood the look: we’re getting in deep here, into something that might destroy us.

Berg had run a separate search on Holtzmann Solar and it yielded results first. She scanned it, scrolling down rapidly. ‘Its global revenue was a little over ten billion dollars last year, putting it in the top twenty pharma companies worldwide. Products across the board, for both human and veterinary use. Its biggest sellers look to be cardiac drugs and psychotropics. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, that kind of thing.’

Purkiss said, ‘Any government contracts?’

‘Not that I can see. The usual drug trial contracts with the state hospitals, emergency departments and that kind of thing. Hold on.’ Berg brought up another window. ‘Here we are. No other Company employee on our records has anything like the same investment in Holtzmann Solar. But here’s an ex-employee who sold his stock in the firm ten years ago. Dennis Crosby. Retired now, lives in rural Jersey.’

The face staring out from the screen was fleshy and nondescript. The man could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. Purkiss said, ‘Looks young to be retired.’

‘Health grounds. Let’s see. Nope, doesn’t say why. That means the Company’s taken special care to keep it a secret. And believe me, they try and keep everything from our prying eyes, so it says something when they actually succeed.’

Purkiss looked at her, then round at Nakamura. ‘Looks like I’ll be taking that road trip, after all.’

*

Crosby was listed as living in Sussex County in north-western New Jersey. Berg estimated the trip at ninety minutes, tops. Before they left the office, Nakamura slipped his hand inside his jacket pocket, drew out a handgun. He stripped it on the desk, reassembled it quickly.

Kendrick watched. ‘Glock 23?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Rifle man, myself.’

Nakamura stared at him. ‘Not much good in your average FBI situation. Believe me.’

‘Why not? Scares the hell out of people. That’s half the battle won already.’

Nakamura snorted.

Kendrick said, ‘So do we get guns, or what?’

‘No chance,’ said Berg. ‘We’re operating outside our zone already. If we let foreign civilians carry firearms we’re finished.’

Kendrick muttered, ‘Ironic though, isn’t it?’

‘What’s ironic?’ said Berg.

‘Well, the enemy are armed, but Purkiss and I don’t get to carry weapons.’

‘That’s not what irony means,’ said Nakamura.

‘Americans don’t understand irony,’ said Kendrick smugly. ‘Well-known fact.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Nakamura. ‘You send us some of that swell irony appreciation of yours, and we’ll send you some of our dentists.’

Kendrick smirked; though with his mouth closed, Purkiss noticed.

Purkiss debated calling Vale but decided against it, just as he’d decided not to consult him earlier before telling Berg and Nakamura the full story. Vale allowed him a lot of latitude, and it was the way Purkiss preferred to work: close support to begin with, but once he was deep into the job, a hands-off approach.

They emerged into the street and climbed into the Taurus, Nakamura again taking the wheel.

Twenty

Sussex County, New Jersey

Monday 20 May, 7.40 pm

As always Purkiss was struck by America’s contrasts, the suddenness with which the metropolis gave way to colossal wildness. His image of New Jersey was that of seaside resorts and decay, so he was taken aback to find himself surrounded by soaring pine forest, lengthening shadows casting darkness across the road as the car wound round the side of a mountain.

Kendrick said, ‘Bloody woods again.’

Berg’s eyes appeared in the mirror. ‘Problem?’

‘He prefers cities,’ said Purkiss.

Berg said, ‘Jersey’s where I’m from originally. Newark.’

‘Small town girl,’ said Nakamura.

‘Yeah, yeah. Danny’s from the Bronx, as you can probably tell. Though you’re British, you may not know accents.’

‘I thought you didn’t sound Chinese,’ said Kendrick.

Purkiss winced.

Nakamura said, ‘How’s that again?’

‘I said, I didn’t think you sounded Chinese. You sound American.’

‘Why would I sound Chinese?’

‘Well — ’ Kendrick glanced at Purkiss for help. Purkiss shook his head.

The silence drew out for twenty seconds, to breaking point. Then Nakamura laughed. ‘Ah, for Christ’s sake. My grandparents were Japanese.’

‘Right.’ Kendrick didn’t look embarrassed, just a little bewildered.

The satellite navigation system indicated that Crosby’s address was a standalone property part of the way up a mountain in the Skylands area. He’d retired a decade earlier at the age of forty-two, around the time he’d offloaded his Holtzmann Solar stock; Purkiss presumed the cashing in had helped fund whatever retirement home he’d bought himself. He’d been single with no children at the time he’d left the Company. The FBI database said nothing more about him.

‘Here,’ said Berg. Nakamura braked more sharply than he’d probably been intending. The gate was set back in a stone wall to the right of the road. An unkempt driveway scrabbled up a slope towards a log cabin, barely visible in the dusk through a dense thicket of trees.

Purkiss got out. The gate was a normal one, not electronic, and slightly gone to rust. He unlatched it and opened it to let the Taurus through.

They parked halfway up the driveway and walked the rest of the distance. A battered pickup truck squatted in front of the cabin. The front porch was illuminated by a single bulb.

Kendrick muttered: ‘Boondocks.’

When they were ten yards from the front door it opened and a man emerged, a shotgun in his hands.

*

‘What in the hell do you want.’

Purkiss’s first thought was: this man is dying. He was skinny to the point of emaciation, the skin drooping off his face like wax down a candle. His shirt hung off bony coat-hanger shoulders, and his trousers were cinched in so severely that the waistband was bunched and folded. The shotgun over his forearm looked too heavy to be supported, like a steel girder draped across a broom handle.

Berg stepped forward, shield held out before her. ‘FBI. We need to speak to Mr Dennis Crosby.’

Purkiss saw it in the man’s eyes, which had appeared small and blue before but were now large in contrast with the rest of his face. He was Crosby, the man from the photo on the FBI database.

‘What about?’ The voice was a whispered rasp. Purkiss could see his fingers, burnt yellow by nicotine.

‘You Crosby?’ said Nakamura.

‘What do you want?’ the man said again.

‘You need to put the gun down, sir.’ Berg put a hand on her hip in a practised gesture, the movement partially opening her jacket to display the shoulder holster.

‘God damn it.’ The man turned and went back through the screen door.

Purkiss glanced at Berg, who nodded. The four of them made their way up to the door. Purkiss half expected a dog to start barking.

The two agents positioned themselves on either side of the door, Berg motioning Purkiss and Kendrick to keep back. She called, ‘Mr Crosby, we’re going to come in now. I need to know you’re not waiting for us with the shotgun.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ The reply was barely audible. An instant later the screen door creaked open. Crosby stood there, holding it. The gun was nowhere to be seen. He jerked his head.

Purkiss and Kendrick followed the agents into the cabin. It was dim and dingy and smelled of cigarette smoke, stale clothes and fried food. The shotgun was on a rack on the wall below a hunting rifle. Propped against the back of a dilapidated sofa was a home oxygen cylinder, its attached tube hissing quietly.

‘Just god damn do it,’ said Crosby, his arms held out in front of him.

‘Do what?’ said Berg.

Purkiss glanced about the room. There was no sign anybody else was there, no tell-tale noises from the other rooms.

‘Take me. At least I’ll get decent hospital care inside. Fuckin’ Medicaid.’

‘Inside?’

Nakamura pointed at the couch. ‘Sit down, man.’

Crosby lowered himself, wheezing, into the sagging seat. He groped for the oxygen tube and fitted the nubs into his nostrils.

Berg said, ‘Why do you think we’ve come to arrest you?’

Crosby shook his head. ‘Don’t play games with me.’

Purkiss said, ‘Holtzmann Solar.’

The agents glared over at him.

Crosby wagged a finger in his direction. ‘See? Told you.’

He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and shook one out, put it between his lips. Nakamura snatched it away.

‘There’s oxygen around.’

Crosby cackled, the sound high and frightening. ‘I’ve got maybe four months left, maybe six. A little Russian roulette livens things up.’

Berg squatted in front of him. ‘Okay. We’re not here to arrest you, necessarily. We’re here to find out what exactly your connection is with Holtzmann Solar, and with two other Company operatives, Gregory Taylor and Sylvia Grosvenor.’

Crosby recoiled as though the names were pellets hurled in his face. ‘You’ve got them?’

‘They’re dead. Murdered.’

‘You’re shitting me.’ He stared over at Purkiss. ‘Ah, Jesus.’ A bout of coughing interrupted him. Towards the end, it sounded as if he was laughing. ‘Funny how people are. Here I am, half a year left at most, and I’m scared of getting whacked.’

Berg said: ‘I think you’d better explain.’

*

‘Jablonsky got me involved. He’d already recruited Taylor and Grosvenor. There might have been others, but I didn’t know about them.’

Crosby was pacing himself, talking in short, fast bursts between periods of wheezing and coughing. Berg and Nakamura were perched on bar stools in front of him. Purkiss leaned against the kitchenette counter off to the side, while Kendrick prowled, gazing out the windows.

‘This was early 1997. No, later. Maybe in the fall of that year. I was a rookie, two years with the Company. Still doing low-level data analysis, based in Washington. Jablonsky’s my superior. He asks me one day, how’d I like to make a little extra? I assume he means freelancing. He says, there’s a pharmaceutical company needs our help. And we need theirs.’

Coughing took over. At the window, Kendrick peered at something. He looked back, caught Purkiss’s gaze, shook his head. Nothing.

Crosby went on. ‘I didn’t get the details at first. Not for several months, in fact. All I knew was that he was suggesting something unsanctioned by the Company, a private project. Once I’d agreed to his proposal, my job was to clean the funds. Take them from Holtzmann Solar as they came in to various accounts around the world, process them till there was no trace of their origins, and funnel them into a final account. Jablonsky and whoever he was working for in the Company would then have access to that.’

‘Whoever he was working for?’ Berg.

‘Oh, yeah. He wasn’t the boss. Might have been small fry, for all I know.’ A brief cough this time. ‘Anyhow. I did that for six months. Laundered money, basically. In return I got perks. Discounted shares in the firm, and insider tip-offs about when to sell. Built up quite a nice little nest egg.

‘Then Jablonsky started letting me in on the work he and his group were doing with Holtzmann Solar. The details, I mean. The operation was named Caliban. It involved drug trials. A new substance. Something that was going to prove invaluable in the field of interrogation, but that couldn’t be subjected to the usual process of authorised clinical trials and FDA approval.

‘It sounded like something the Nazis did. I asked Jablonsky where he was getting the volunteers for this project. He said they weren’t exactly volunteers, that they were the scum of the earth. Prisoners, low-lifes. I got cold feet. It was okay when I was just being creative with electronic money; not so much when I learned what the money was being used for. I said I wanted out.

‘Jablonsky laid it on thick. Was I a patriot, did I truly care about national security, blah, blah, blah. Then he got threatening. I told him I had insurance, documentary evidence of everything I’d done for him hidden away with instructions for it to be revealed in the event of my disappearance. He got shit scared. Agreed to let me get out, no questions asked, in return for my silence.’

‘And you got out,’ said Nakamura.

‘Yeah. But around a year after he’d first approached me — would have been the end of 1998, I guess, before Thanksgiving, I remember that — Jablonsky called me out of the blue. I was working in Syracuse by then. He just said, “If it eases your conscience, Caliban’s been terminated.” He wasn’t being nice; it was just that he probably hoped I’d be less likely to blow the whistle if I knew it was all over.’

Purkiss said: ‘You retired ten years ago. So you stayed with the CIA for, what, five years after all this?’

Crosby blinked across as if he’d forgotten Purkiss was there. ‘That’s right. Like I said, Syracuse and upstate New York generally, then a brief posting in Israel after 9/11. But my heart wasn’t in it. Early 2003, just around the time we hit Iraq, I decided to get out entirely. I was depressed, on meds. Couldn’t function. Tracked Jablonsky down and got him to pull some strings, get me retired on medical grounds. Plus a final tip-off about Holtzmann Solar share prices. I made a killing.’

Nakamura said, ‘No offence, man, but this place is a shithole.’

Crosby nodded. ‘The land cost a bit, but yeah, you’re right. Short answer, I gave the money away. Almost all of it. Had another attack of conscience, and found I couldn’t spend blood money.’ He gave another mewling laugh. ‘If I’d known I’d get emphysema, I might have kept a little back.’

Purkiss listened, thinking hard. It all suggested Pope was on a mission to take out everyone involved in Caliban. A cleaning-up operation. Did that mean he’d been hired by the CIA, or perhaps by whomever it was that had been in charge of Caliban and was now covering his or her tracks? And the men who’d come after Purkiss in Hamburg and later in Manhattan: were they Pope’s backup?

Something didn’t feel right.

Berg said, ‘What about the insurance you spoke about? The evidence you kept hidden, incriminating Jablonsky and the others?’

‘There never was any. Sure, I could keep a record of everything I’d done, laundering the money. But there was no proof of Jablonsky’s involvement, or Holtzmann Solar’s. Jablonsky was scared I had something on him — he’s Company, we’re paranoid by nature — but I didn’t. So it was all bluff.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess somebody’s calling the bluff now.’

‘Mr Crosby, are you willing to testify to all of this?’

Crosby sniggered again. ‘What’ve I got to lose? They’re going to come for me already, whoever they are.’

From the window Kendrick spoke, low and urgent.

‘They’re already here.’

Twenty-One

Between Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington D.C.

Monday 20 May, 11.40 pm

Pope was by inclination a marathon runner, not a sprinter; but while speed was important, he had the advantage of surprise, and he hoped it would carry him through.

The distance from the bottom of the slope to where the three figures were standing was about a hundred yards, possibly slightly less. The woman had stopped and begun sidling sideways, so presumably there was some sort of barrier blocking her path: a fence or a ditch. The men were taking their time reaching her but would be at her in a minute, if everyone continued moving at their current pace.

He had surprise on his side, because the rain, light though it was, was deadening the sound of his approach, and in any case the two men wouldn’t be expecting anyone to come sprinting up to them from behind. Against him was the quality of the ground. Pitted and gnarled, it would be all too easy to sprain an ankle, and then he’d be finished.

He ran in strides longer than usual to afford extra stability, feeling himself settle into a steady rhythm as he gained ground on the small group. Fifty yards covered now. If he could get within ten yards he’d be safe; even if they were armed — and Pope assumed they were — they wouldn’t be able to bring their weapons to bear before his momentum had carried him straight into them.

With thirty yards to go, the girl saw him.

She was superb, a distant part of his mind appreciated: there was no stifled shriek, no reflexive drawing away. She recognised that he was coming to the rescue, and she reacted like a professional; namely, she didn’t react at all.

The men were talking to her, he registered, as he bore down on the final approach and picked up his speed as though aiming to breast a finishing tape. The two men were side by side, the taller one doing the talking. It meant the other one was probably the muscle.

Pope launched the kick in midair, his foot catching the man squarely in the back just below the neck. The man’s torso barrelled forward while inertia kept his head where it was so that his neck snapped back. He was lifted off his feet, and this time the girl did scream as she dived out of the way. Pope disregarded the first man and landed on his feet at a crouch, facing the other man and with his back to the girl.

The taller man was fast, his gun already out. Pope hacked at his wrist with the edge of his hand, caught the gun barrel instead, knocking it aside but not out of the man’s grip. The man kicked at Pope’s kneecap and made contact, sending a sheaf of pain up through Pope’s leg. He stumbled, doubling, but he was bluffing and the other man was a fraction slow in stepping back and raising his gun in a two-handed grip to deliver the execution shot.

Pope lunged, gripping the man’s wrists in his clasped hands and yanking him forward so that he was pulled off his feet. Pope’s knee connected hard with the man’s face and he collapsed, prone.

‘Look out,’ yelled the woman a second before Pope flung himself sideways and the shot whined past his head, trailing a blast that echoed off the walls of the miniature valley. He rolled on to and over the prone man, prising the gun free from his flaccid fingers and coming up to a sitting position as the second shot too went wide, far wider than it should have. Pope saw the first man, the one he’d kicked in the back, stagger slightly, one hand to the side of his head as his gun arm wove to take a bead again. The woman was off to the side, cowering.

Pope shot the man twice, once in the head and once through the chest before the first shot had dropped him. The man dropped to his knees, his torso remaining upright for a second like a hammy actor in a death scene. Pope rose and strode over and put a third shot into what was left of the man’s head.

He went back to the other man and turned him over. The knee to his face had killed him.

*

Neither man had anything useful on him apart from a gun. Their driver’s licences identified them as Francis King and Dwayne Harlan. Pope pocketed the licences and took the guns. A Heckler amp; Koch USP — the one he’d just fired — and a Glock 22.

The woman, Ramirez, stood clutching her violin case to her, shivering as though in January sleet rather than warm spring evening drizzle. Pope stuck the guns in his belt and held out a hand.

‘My name’s Pope. Don’t be afraid.’

She didn’t move. In the dark her eyes gleamed white, above and below the irises.

‘It’s over. Or it will be, if we get out of here now.’

At first he thought she’d hooted a laugh, but when it came again he caught it: ‘Who.’

‘Who am I? A friend. I’ll explain in a moment. Once we’ve got back on to the road and into my car.’ He stepped forward, hand still extended.

She took it.

*

Pope kept his gaze fixed on the road above them as they crossed the field, but there were no flashing lights up there yet.

The girl stumbled beside him, clutching her violin even though it would have been more practical to strap it across her back. Her head was lowered.

‘You hit him with a rock, didn’t you?’

She stared at him.

‘The man back there. He was aiming at me and you got him. Made him miss.’ He smiled in the darkness. ‘You saved my life. I’m very grateful.’

He wasn’t trying to get her to speak. He just wanted to give her a boost, keep her on her feet and moving forward.

They reached the foot of the slope and he started up, tugging at her hand; but she needed no prompting, and he felt able to let go. A few feet from the top he motioned to her to stop, and crept forward, peering over the top of the rail. There was the Toyota, its headlights still on, and behind it his Mercedes with its hazard lights flicking. No police.

When she’d climbed over the rail he took her elbow lightly and led her to the Toyota. He opened the door and scouted around. The interior smelled of stale cigarette smoke with an overlay of pine air freshener. Nothing in the glove compartment or under any of the seats.

At the Mercedes he opened the passenger door and gently pressed her inside.

‘I can put that in the back,’ he said, indicating the violin. But she strapped herself in and held the case across her chest. Fair enough.

He stowed the Glock in the glove compartment, and the Heckler amp; Koch under his seat. As he pulled away into the rain and the steady flow of cars, he saw the red, blue and white flashing lights approaching the spot behind him in the distance. No sirens yet. Those would come later.

*

‘Your name’s Nina Ramirez. Mine’s Darius Pope, but people just call me Pope.’

He’d thought about bluffing, pretending he was simply a passerby who’d happened to stop at a parked Toyota saloon by the side of the road and happened to spot two men chasing a young woman across a distant field and decided to intervene. But he knew she wouldn’t buy that.

At first she’d stared straight ahead through the windscreen, but now her gaze was turned on him. He could see it on the corner of his vision even as he drove. Large eyes, cheekbones high and fine, delicate nose and chin. The way she carried herself convinced him that she was one of those rare people who genuinely didn’t realise how attractive they were.

‘You’re heading to Washington. To find someone there, I wonder, or maybe just to get away from those men.’

‘Who — ’ The word barely rasped out and she swallowed and tried again. ‘Who were they?’

That was interesting. She was asking who they were, rather than who he was. It suggested she trusted him a little. Perhaps not much, but enough to be starting with.

‘CIA. There’ll be more of them.’ When she drew in a breath, he said, ‘I won’t say “don’t worry”. But I’ll protect you. You can survive this.’

‘They killed my friends.’

‘Back in Charlottesville? What happened there?’

‘They started following me this afternoon. Maybe before, but that’s when I first noticed them. I went to my friends for help. They broke in, shot them dead. I jumped out the window.’

Pope watched the road in silence for a full ten seconds, then said: ‘You did well. If you’d stayed, they would have killed you.’

‘Why?’

He’d rehearsed several different scenarios, played them out to their possible conclusions, keeping in mind at all times that you could never fully predict how human beings would behave or how conversations would run. He was having to modify his approach now based on the information he was getting from her demeanour, her body language.

‘Nina, I’m going to ask you an odd question. Humour me. I want you to think back to when you were a child. Eleven years old. Tell me what you remember of that time.’

‘Who are you?’

She’d asked it, then, finally. And it had been the strangeness of his own question that had triggered it.

‘Just let’s focus on you at eleven — ’

‘Who are you.’

Sharper this time. He’d have to give her something.

‘I have a connection with your father.’

Twenty-Two

Interstate 95, Outside Washington D.C.

Tuesday 21 May, 12.15 am

The adrenaline had begun to drain from her limbs like fuel from an engine, leaving her feeling inert and immobile.

There’d been the terror of the advancing men, the shock of seeing the sprinting figure coming up behind them, then the awful physicality of the violence which had followed. Nina barely remembered picking up the rock and heaving it at the gunman’s head, but she remembered being utterly confused as to why he then dropped to his knees, shaking, until she understood that the newcomer had shot him.

The blasts had set up a high whine in her ears which hadn’t gone yet.

She watched the man beside her. Pope, he called himself. He sounded British, and educated, though she didn’t know much about distinguishing British accents. His profile was impossibly handsome, movie-star quality.

And, unbelievably, there was something familiar about him.

His phrases were like sharp jabs form a needle, one after the other so that she barely had time to register the shock of one before the next came.

CIA…

There’ll be more of them…

They would have killed you…

And then the one that stuck, lingering: I have a connection with your father.

Somewhere in the middle of it all he’d asked something about her childhood, but perhaps she’d imagined that; imagined she was undergoing therapy of some kind.

The highway droned by outside, the monotonous beat of the windshield wipers like a pendulum lulling her under.

‘What connection?’ she heard a thin, distant voice say. Her own. ‘Did he send you?’

‘No.’ Was there the trace of a smile in his voice? ‘Not exactly. Though indirectly I suppose he did.’

Their exchange was too elliptical, too many-sided, for Nina to find a clear way in. She sat in silence once more.

He said, softly, ‘When you were eleven, Nina, you lived on an island, didn’t you?’

She blurted, almost cutting him off: ‘I know you.’

This time he looked across at her, and did smile; though the smile was touched with sadness.

‘In a sense, you probably do.’

*

It’s an afternoon, clear and bright, mountains of cumulus (she’s learned about clouds this week; her mother’s taught her) towering overhead. This is a few weeks before that night when she heard the screams and went out to look under moonlight.

She’s playing alone on the lawn outside the house. Her mother’s inside, resting. Her father’s at work, his car gone. There are no other girls or boys on the island. When will they be going back to their real home, she wondered again this morning. Soon, honey, her mother whispered in her hair.

The gate’s closed but the wall’s easy to climb. Bored, she shins over it, dropping to the dirt. Across the road, the Box sits in the heat like the brownies her mom bakes.

In the daylight, when it’s silent, it doesn’t frighten her.

She crosses the road (looks both ways carefully first, as she’s been taught, though there are no cars) and approached the Box. She’s never been this close before. Her mom and dad have told her never to go near it.

A voice, loud and angry as an animal’s roar, makes her leap in the air and freeze at the same time. She turns, her heart like a drill. It’s the tall man, the one her father calls Taylor. She doesn’t like him. He’s always bad-tempered, even when he laughs. He’s not laughing now.

He’s running over to her from around the side of the Box, yelling. Using words her mom told her she should never say, words with F and Jesus’s name. He even calls her a little B. She’s too scared to run. He grabs her shoulders and shakes her.

‘Get away from her.’

She remembers the words, and the voice, clearly. The words because they’re so calm; the voice, because it sounds a little odd, like he’s not American or Spanish. He’s standing behind Taylor. She doesn’t know his name, but she sees him around sometimes. He doesn’t look angry.

Taylor turns round and starts using that sneering voice, asking the other man who the F does he think he is. He stands close to the other man (she thinks it’s called “getting in his face”). The other man says something so quietly she can’t hear. Taylor Fs and MFs some more and goes away.

The man whose name she doesn’t know comes over to her. She’s not tall yet, though she’ll grow in the next year. He hunkers down on his heels and asks her if she’s okay. She says yes. He helps her back to her home, saying a lot of other stuff which she doesn’t remember.

What she remembers is his eyes. She sees something there she’s never seen in anyone’s before. Not her mom’s, and certainly not her dad’s.

*

‘He was angry for me. Not at me, but for me.’

Pope hadn’t said a word. How long had she been talking for? She stared at him, his face again in profile. He was utterly unreadable.

It struck Nina suddenly that she had no idea where they were going. They weren’t on the Interstate any more.

Before she could ask, Pope said, ‘What are your feelings towards your father?’

It really is like a therapy session, she thought, and that crazy reckless giggle threatened to erupt again. She swallowed it, hoping to seem as if she was finding difficulty organising her thoughts.

‘He abandoned me when I was eleven. Gave me to my grandmother and never tried to make contact again. No birthday or Christmas cards, no letters or emails. So I feel betrayed by him. Betrayed, hurt, and confused. I want to know why he did it. More than almost anything else in the world.’ The words started rolling out, beyond her control. ‘I mean, if he wasn’t up to being a single dad, I can understand, you know? He was an incredibly busy man, wrapped up in his work. Awkward with kids, from what I recall. But even if he felt my gramma was the best person to look after me — and she probably was — he could at least have called or written me from time to time. Or now that I’m grown up, made contact to explain to me why he did what he did.’

As though sensing she was saying more than she’d intended and wanting to save her from embarrassment, Pope cut in: ‘How do you believe your mother died, Nina?’

She took a breath, slowed herself deliberately. ‘She was killed in the storm. The big one that hit the island and the rest of Honduras that year.’

‘Your father told you that.’

‘Yes. And my gramma.’

‘And your grandmother heard it from… whom?’

‘My father, I guess.’ She stared at the side of his face again. ‘You said, how do I “believe” my mom died.’

He glanced across. This time there was sadness without the smile.

‘Your father killed her.’

Twenty-Three

Sussex County, New Jersey

Monday 20 May, 8.15 pm

There were four of them, spilling out of a black Range Rover that had pulled up past Nakamura’s Taurus on the driveway. Men in camo trousers and flak jackets hauling an assortment of weapons with them, the ratcheting clicks audible through the glass of the window.

Purkiss ran to the wall with the racked shotgun and hunting rifle. Kendrick had beaten him to it. The FBI agents stood at a crouch, handguns emerging smoothly from their jackets.

‘Four of them, armed,’ said Purkiss. Berg and Nakamura didn’t waste time going to the window. Instead they positioned themselves kneeling, guns aimed, Berg’s at the door and Nakamura’s at the window.

‘Where’s the ammo?’ Kendrick snarled at Crosby, who was rocking on the couch, head bent, muttering. Kendrick strode over to him and tapped his forehead with the stock of the rifle.

‘Where’s the fucking ammo?’

‘Sideboard drawer,’ Crosby whispered.

Purkiss said, ‘Got any more guns?’

‘No.’

‘Told you we should have been given guns,’ Kendrick yelled at Nakamura and Berg.

Purkiss hefted the shotgun. It was a Remington 870, a model he’d handled before. Shotguns weren’t his preferred weapon. He caught the handful of cartridges Kendrick tossed at him and thumbed them one by one into the tube magazine. Six in all.

The men wouldn’t come knocking at the door. They’d have seen the Taurus and realised Crosby had visitors. In any case, they hadn’t come in dressed suits, for a chat or even to threaten him. This was a hit.

To Crosby he said, ‘The back entrance,’ and Crosby indicated the doorway to the living room, curving his fingers to the left. Purkiss racked the Remington’s slide mechanism and stepped out into the corridor beyond, swinging to his left.

A short passage ended in a door with a pane of opaque glass through which the evening was visible. A dark silhouette rose into view, blurred by the glass but clearly raising its arms. Purkiss recognised the two-handed grip.

He pulled the triggers. The shotgun bucked in his hands as the pane erupted, the smashing glass a high counterpoint to the roar of the blast. From beyond there was a yell, then the emptiness of a back garden through the ruined gap.

Purkiss moved quickly to the door, pumping the gun again. He swivelled left, then right, peering through the remains of the door. A man lay on his back on the concrete of the back porch, a pistol several feet from his outflung hand. His flak jacket had absorbed some of the blast; so had his face. He was gone.

Behind him Purkiss heard hammering and yells. He ran back down the passage to the living room. Crosby sat, arms wrapped around his bony chest, rocking. Berg, Nakamura and Kendrick were fixed on the front door, which Kendrick had locked but which was taking a pounding.

‘The window,’ he yelled. Berg reacted quickly, spinning and raising her gun as the man’s head and arms appeared above the sill and the glass exploded as he fired. Berg fired back at almost the same moment. The man’s bullet smashed into the couch a few inches from Crosby’s legs. He flinched and wheezed.

The bashing on the door stopped. In the sudden silence the hissing from Crosby’s oxygen cylinder was startlingly loud.

They’re regrouping, thought Purkiss. They’ve seen how many of us there are in here.

He ducked his head back into the passage but there was nobody at the back door. A creak in the timbers made him look up. They could come from any direction: front, back, the roof.

Kendrick was advancing at a stoop towards the front window. He crouched below the sill, then stood quickly, aimed the rifle, and loosed off a shot, ducking down again immediately.

‘They’re back at the car,’ he said.

Berg said, ‘All of them?’

‘At least three.’

‘What’re they doing?’

Kendrick mouthed a countdown — three, two, one — and stood again, fired, and ducked.

‘Ah shit,’ he said. ‘Down.’

He dived to the floor, barging into Berg who was crouched behind him. Nakamura sprawled a second later. Purkiss, at the door, hurled himself across to the sofa and knocked Crosby off the end, then rolled off himself and dropped to his knees and hunched his back.

The barrage was like the grinding of an impossibly vast engine, the shots ripping through the log walls and screaming through the living room, smashing furniture and shattering ornaments into cascades of glass and porcelain, sizzling like bees above Purkiss’s head beneath his clasped hands. He felt something wet spray across his back and heard a scream and opened his eyes to see Crosby upright and doing an odd dance, jerking and spinning like a fish on a line. He stood up, tried to make a run for it, and even as Purkiss watched, Crosby’s head burst sideways and his scarecrow’s body was flung across the sofa and over the back.

The gunfire went on, and on, and Purkiss tried to flatten himself on to the floor because some of the slugs were coming through very low now, either knocked off course by the log wall they had to pass through or because they were being fired deliberately low, which meant the men were advancing. He saw in his restricted, floor-level world Nakamura crawling in the direction of the front door, Berg haplessly wanting to sit up but unable to risk it, Kendrick squirming like a salamander towards the cover of an armchair which was itself a blooming tree of ripped and puffed upholstery and wood chippings.

The back door, Purkiss thought. None of them would be coming in there because they’d risk getting hit by friendly fire from the front.

He shouted at the others but the cacophony was too great. Grabbing the shotgun he crawled on his elbows towards the doorway. On the way there he saw the oxygen cylinder, half-hidden under Crosby’s body behind the sofa.

He slid across on his belly and grasped the ring at the top of the cylinder and dragged it free, Crosby collapsing hard on to the floor. Purkiss heaved both cylinder and shotgun through the doorway and sat with his back against the frame. The gunfire was coming in five-second bursts now, one gun keeping the momentum going while the others were reloaded.

Into the relative quiet Purkiss shouted, ‘Kendrick.’

Kendrick looked round, disorientated, saw Purkiss at the door.

Purkiss tapped the oxygen cylinder.

Kendrick stared for a second, then nodded once, getting it. Purkiss stood, lifted the shotgun in one hand and hoisted the cylinder across his other shoulder, and ran.

The back door, ruined by the blast from the shotgun, gave way to a kick. A scrubby back yard was bordered by the high forest. He stepped over the body of the man he’d hit with the Remington earlier ran close to the wall, following it to the right of the door. At the corner, a narrow concrete path ran along one side of the house to the front.

Purkiss reached the front corner and, keeping low, risked a glance round. Across the scrap of lawn the remaining three men were clustered between their Range Rover and the front of the house. They were spread out and advancing unhurriedly, each holding an assault rifle. Armalites of some variety.

Purkiss gauged the distance. Ten yards. Perhaps twelve. He gripped the oxygen cylinder by the ring, hefting it. Because of the angle he would have to use his left arm, his weaker one.

He waited until all three of the uninjured men had reloaded and stood spread out before the cabin, one kneeling and two erect, firing again in what was clearly meant as a final, punishing assault. Then he stepped slightly beyond the corner of the building and swung his left arm up and over his head.

The oxygen cylinder spun almost in slow motion, describing a high parabola and dropping just as one of the men spotted Purkiss at the corner and yelled, bringing the spewing end of his rifle to bear. Before the seam of fire could stitch its way across the corner of the cabin the cylinder landed in front of the guns.

Purkiss heard the chink of bullets against its side and actually heard it hit the ground a split-second before it exploded, the sucking whoosh propelling fragments of its casing outwards like a starburst, one whipping into the timber above his head. A sheet of flame surged and dwindled as suddenly and the screams began, terrible even to Purkiss’s ears. He’d dodged back to avoid the shrapnel but glanced back and saw one man on his back on the ground, clawing at the dancing sprites of fire eating away his chest and belly and nipping at his hair; another man stumbling aside, his rifle still gripped in one fist, his other arm brushing in confusion across his eyes. The fourth one had landed on his belly on the lawn and kept his wits about him and was crawling forward like a commando, grasping his weapon.

Along the front of the cabin from Purkiss, he saw Kendrick lean across the sill of the shattered front window and take aim with his rifle. The stumbling man had orientated himself once more and raised his rifle. Kendrick loosed off two shots, hitting the stumbling man in the chest and knocking him off his feet, and the screaming burning man on the ground who convulsed and then stopped his shrieks. Kendrick ducked out of sight as the crawling man on the lawn pointed his rifle upwards at the window. As Purkiss stepped out the man swung the gun to aim at Purkiss. Purkiss racked the shotgun and fired, but he was too far away for a clear shot and was already diving back behind the corner as the muzzle of the rifle erupted again.

Pressed against the wall, Purkiss counted the seconds: on three he’d swing round again and use the shotgun. Into the silence he heard Kendrick’s voice. ‘Purkiss? You okay?’

He’s coming out the front door, thought Purkiss. He thinks I hit the crawling man.

‘Stay back,’ yelled Purkiss, and stepped back past the corner, levelling the shotgun.

Kendrick was staring at him, halfway through the doorway. Behind him, below the front window, the crawling man had the rifle aimed.

Kendrick saw Purkiss’s eyes and began to turn. It was too late.

The shots came, two, three, and Purkiss almost closed his eyes against the scream.

Kendrick had turned and dropped to one knee. Past him, the crawling man sprawled, blood gouting from his chest. Nakamura leaned through the front window, his Glock still trained on the man.

For a full six seconds nobody moved, the tableau frozen in the sudden silence.

Twenty-Four

Sussex County, New Jersey

Monday 20 May, 9.20 pm

‘We call it in.’

‘We don’t.’

The argument had been raging between the two agents for ten minutes. The four of them were roving about the property, Purkiss and Kendrick in silence. There was nothing useful among any of Crosby’s possessions, nothing by way of identification on any of the dead attackers.

It was time to go.

Berg and Nakamura stood facing off like a bickering couple.

‘I could pull rank here, Danny.’

‘We’re way out of line,’ said Nakamura. ‘We’re acting without authority. Rank doesn’t come into it.’

Berg pulled out her mobile phone. Nakamura took a step closer.

‘Berg, god damn it — ’

‘I’m calling it in anonymously, okay?’ she snapped. Nakamura raised his hands in a whatever gesture.

Purkiss walked down to the Taurus and gave it a once over. No bullet holes, and the tyres looked intact.

As Kendrick approached Purkiss saw his hands were shaking a little. He said, ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah. Christ, it hits you, doesn’t it? Afterwards.’

In the car, Nakamura at the wheel once more, Kendrick said, ‘Kind of liked your shooting back there.’

‘Huh.’ But Nakamura looked pleased.

Nakamura took the driveway quickly and turned on to the hillside road, heading back the way they’d come. It was an isolated location but not so remote that the noise wouldn’t have attratced attention. The emergency vehicles began to flash past them after five minutes.

Purkiss said, ‘We need access to your database again. As soon as possible.’

*

They found access at a diner in the first small town they reached on the way back towards New York. It had a light evening crowd, mainly student types.

Berg approached the owner, a surly man in his sixties, and held her shield high, speaking a few quick words. Within minutes the rest of the patrons had been cleared out. They muttered angrily but looked fascinated at the same time. Purkiss and the others looked a mess. Dust and wood splinters coated their hair and their clothes. Perversely, Purkiss looked the most presentable of all of them; Nakamura had found a sweater in the boot of his car which Purkiss put on to replace his jacket, which was streaked with Crosby’s blood. The sweater was both too short and too wide for him

The two waitresses had hung up their aprons and were on their way out. The owner turned the CLOSED sign outwards and locked the door. He said, ‘Help yourself to coffee.’

‘Thanks,’ said Berg. ‘You’ll be reimbursed.’

He disappeared into a back room. Berg opened her laptop on one of the tables near the back, where they could all view it. She used the code the owner had given her to get into the diner’s WiFi network and accessed the database within a minute.

‘Caliban. Nothing’s coming up.’

She cross-referenced it with a range of years — 1995 until 2000 — but there were no hits. Jablonsky’s name went into the mix, as did Crosby’s, Taylor’s and Grosvenor’s. Still nothing. She added “Holtzmann Solar”. All that appeared on the screen was the connection with the stocks and shares the CIA agents had owned and sold.

‘Damn it.’

‘It’s too direct,’ said Purkiss. ‘Try Holtzmann Solar’s bank accounts. See where they send their money.’

A few hits came up, mainly in connection with investigations into fraud within the company. Nothing suggested there had been any suspicions on the FBI’s part of money being salted away to avoid the gaze of the IRS or anyone else.

Abby, thought Purkiss, this is where we need you. Abby Holt had been a computer genius, one of a rare breed who was equally adept with the hardware and software aspects of computing. She’d have thought of a way in.

Purkiss thought best when he was moving. He stood and stepped away from the group and began pacing, long strides to the counter of the diner and back. He played Crosby’s words over again in his head, until one phrase snagged him.

Something that was going to prove invaluable in the field of interrogation.

There was an echo there. Interrogation… it had come up in another conversation since his pursuit of Pope had begun.

Purkiss took out his mobile and hit the speed dial button.

‘Vale.’ The reply came after a single ring.

‘Quentin, it’s me.’

‘What’s been happening?’

‘What have you heard?’ Purkiss wasn’t being deliberately elliptical. Raw data about how much of the mission was leaking through to the outside world could often prove useful.

‘The Service man at the New York embassy, Delatour, said he saw you being taken down by two men. There are reports of a car crash a few minutes later in Lower Manhattan. Other than that, nothing.’

‘They were CIA, but rogue ones. Possibly part of a black ops cell.’ Purkiss gave Vale a brief rundown, including the fact that four more men had been killed up at Crosby’s cabin. He didn’t mention the two FBI officers, merely that he was receiving help with his research.

Vale said, ‘I can get a search done myself on Holtzmann Solar, see if the Service or Security have anything on them.’

‘There’s something in particular I’m calling about.’

Vale waited.

‘Remind me what the Amsterdam spook, Gifford, said about Pope. I have the gist, but run through what you remember of what he told us.’

‘Pope’s early life? Grammar school, political science at Bristol — ’

‘Later than that. What sort of work has he done in the Service, that kind of thing.’

‘Surveillance, data analysis…’

‘Interrogation work?’

‘Let’s see. No, not that I remember. A people person, but not in that way. Good at charming people in social situations, but as far as I know not the persuasive type that would be much use during forced debriefings.’

Purkiss shook his head at the euphemism. ‘In that case, was Pope himself interrogated? Did Gifford mention anything about that?’

Vale rustled paper for a few moments — his cigarettes, Purkiss knew — and said: ‘I’m working from memory here, and I’m an old man. But no, I can’t remember anything like that — ’

‘Hang on.’ An old man. Pope’s old man…

‘His father.’

Vale said, after a beat, ‘Ah, yes. You’re right. His father, Geoffrey, was something of an expert on interrogation.’

Purkiss felt a fist of hope clench in his chest.

*

‘This might take a while.’

Berg’s hands were blurring over the keyboard. On the monitor streams of data were flooding by. Personnel files with introductory biographies, histories of drug development, political connections and donations. As per standard operating procedure with all big corporations, Berg said, the FBI had done routine and extensive background checks on Holtzmann Solar. Nothing even remotely underhand had emerged.

Purkiss didn’t expect the search to reveal much. He’d suggested Berg carry it out because he needed something to distract them while he waited for Vale to ring back.

The café owner put his head round the door at one point, caught Nakamura’s expression and withdrew back into whatever den he had set up in the back.

Purkiss paced some more, ignoring the looks of irritation he got from Kendrick and Nakamura. He, Vale, Gifford… none of them had considered the personal angle when trying to find a link between Pope and the people he’d killed. They’d been blinded by the political dimension to the killings: spy murdering spy, and from a nominally allied agency to boot.

Purkiss’s phone buzzed. He stepped away. It was Vale.

‘John. I’ve emailed you Geoffrey Pope’s dossier, but here’s the gist. He was semi-freelance for the last couple of years of his life. Senior enough that he was given a free rein to investigate what he liked, as long as he didn’t bring the Service into disrepute. The last record of his work was when he went undercover in the US in early 1997. There are no details of the cover he assumed, but he’d dropped hints that he was investigating something in the field of interrogation science.’

‘Any connection with Holtzmann Solar?’

‘No. Nor with the CIA, that we can find. But the circumstances of his death are relevant.’

Gifford had said Pope senior had been killed in a flying accident.

Vale went on: ‘His body was found in the wreckage of a light aircraft in the sea off the Atlantic coast of Guatemala, on November the fifth, 1998. Days after the region was hit by the worst hurricane on record.’

Twenty-Five

Langley, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 4.45 pm

‘Give it to me.’

Giordano had been on the way back from the canteen when his phone rang: Naomi, saying there’d been developments. Adrienne had packed him a tuna salad for a mid-afternoon snack in a Tupperware container. He’d eaten it dutifully, then told himself he needed extra fuel for what was proving to be a stressful time, and had gulped down spare ribs and fries standing up at a counter in the canteen, feeling like an office worker sneaking a cigarette in the rain. Adrienne would understand, if she ever found out. Not that she would.

Naomi and Kenny were already in his office.

‘Two of our agents, involved in a fender bender in Lower Manhattan. One injured slightly, the other okay.’

‘Names?’

‘Melvin Barker and Louis Campbell,’ said Kenny, trying to keep his oar in the conversation.

‘Don’t know them.’ Giordano held out his hand. ‘Give me that.’

Naomi handed him the printed pages. Less-than-focused photos showed the two agents’ faces, the Crown Vic with its side smashed in, sitting like a rock around which the river of traffic flowed.

‘We’re in a wrangle with local law enforcement, trying to get them to back off and leave this to us,’ said Naomi. ‘They’re muttering about us overstepping our mark. It doesn’t help that Barker and Campbell are claiming this is nothing more than a hit-and-run, an accident. The NYPD Commissioner in Manhattan is saying, if that’s the case, why not let the boys in blue handle it?’

‘It’s not an accident.’ Giordano made it half sound like a question.

‘Probably not, because several witnesses claim a guy was dragged out of the backseat of the car just after the crash happened. Tall, dark hair, hands cuffed behind his back. Two of the witnesses positively IDed the guy as the Brit, John Purkiss, when they were shown a selection of identikit pictures.’

‘God damn.’ Giordano thought for a moment. ‘Any of these witnesses see who dragged him out?’

‘None that can keep their stories straight.’

‘All right. Get me a car to New York. Like, yesterday.’

‘Sir.’

Kenny disappeared. When Giordano saw Naomi lingering he said, ‘What?’

‘What are you planning, boss?’

‘To talk to those two goons. Barker and Campbell. Find out why they’re lying about Purkiss. If they’re embarrassed about having lost him, why the hell don’t they just own up and say so? Their car was rammed. Could have happened to anyone.’

After a beat she said, ‘Come with you?’

‘No.’ When he saw her expression, Giordano said, ‘Look. You’d be a great help. But I need you here, co-ordinating things. In case any new intel comes in.’

‘Sure, boss.’ He waited for her to say whatever, an expression the young seemed to use like punctuation these days and one that never failed to set his teeth on edge. But she didn’t.

*

Giordano heaved himself into the leather backseat of the car, a Pontiac with bulletproof glass and body armour. He always felt faintly ridiculous travelling in a vehicle that seemed designed more to protect a president than a Company officer, even one of Giordano’s seniority. The driver was some guy named Dave or Mike whom Giordano had seen before and usually made pleasant small talk with. Not this time.

He checked his watch. Five thirty p.m. He’d be in Manhattan by nine forty-five if Dave-or-Mike put his foot down and there were no unforeseen traffic snarlups. The New York office was under strict instructions to keep Campbell and Barker there until he arrived.

Four and a quarter hours. Purkiss could be long gone by then.

But Giordano thought he knew what the Brit was doing in New York; and if he was right, Purkiss would still be there.

*

Giordano called Adrienne. Didn’t look as if he’d be home tonight. No, he wouldn’t be bunking down at Langley. He’d find somewhere comfortable in Midtown, maybe with a view of Central Park, on the Company’s dime. Yes, the tuna salad had been delicious, as had the fat-free yogurt snacks. No, no cholesterol-laden treats in between.

He hated to lie to her.

Perhaps, if this was wrapped up by the morning, he’d amble down Fifth Avenue and visit one of those terrifying shops that made him, a scion of the nation’s intelligence establishment, feel like a straw-chewing rube with cow flop on his heels. He’d turn his mind away from the figure on the price tag and get Adrienne something nice. Something that showed he did think of her, did find time for her alongside his work. Though an expensive present might make it seem like he was trying too hard. Giordano had no feel for the intricacies of gift-giving and social rituals in general, and he was the first to admit it.

He got a bottle of mineral water from the minibar in the back of the Pontiac and opened his briefcase. From it he pulled a sheaf of printed papers. He wasn’t a complete Luddite like any others of his generation, but he was old enough to experience discomfort from reading words on a screen for too long, and far preferred the printed word. Giordano had done the printouts himself, on his own printer, once he’d received the email. He’d got it not from Naomi but from another source.

John Purkiss. Everything the Company had on him, gleaned from contacts they had inside the British Secret Service. One of the many interesting things about Purkiss was his odd status with SIS. It wasn’t clear from the information on the printouts if Purkiss was still an employee of the organisation or not. What was clear was that his role was an unusual, perhaps unique, one. He was in effect SIS’s Internal Affairs, a one-man department tasked with cleaning the organisation’s stables. His existence was suspected by many but apparently known of by relatively few; and in the legend that had grown up he was known as the Ratcatcher.

Which meant he wasn’t in the US to kill Company men, and had probably had no hand in the Amsterdam killings either. He was here to find the perpetrator. And that meant the killer was British Intelligence.

Which threw up a whole assortment of new questions.

Like most veteran spooks, Giordano appreciated the profound value of proxies. Proxies to fight your wars, to buffer your losses. He’d cut his teeth as a young operative in the end game of the Cold War back in the late seventies and early eighties, when the Company and the Soviets had slugged it out in Angola and then Nicaragua at one remove. Spying had always used middle men, down to the simplest cut-out in the transmission of a coded message. But proxies could be used in other ways, too.

Purkiss looked like a professional. In which case, Giordano intended to make use of his skills. Let the Brit do the legwork and lead him to the perpetrator.

Twenty-Six

Interstate 95

Tuesday 21 May, 12.40 am

The display on the dashboard said it was nearly a quarter to one. Nina didn’t know where they were, paid no attention to the signs that flashed by, the landscape beyond the road. They’d bypassed Washington, that she was sure of.

Beside her Pope hadn’t spoken for a full ten minutes. The silence had gone beyond uncomfortable and felt now like a canvas shroud.

Nina needed the bathroom, but wasn’t going to break the silence with a banality like that. She clasped the violin closer.

As if reading her mind — again — Pope said, ‘We need to stop for petrol.’

Even though he was English, the word sounded jarring to her ear.

After about a mile the red lighting of a Texaco forecourt grew through the rain. He turned off the road and pulled up beside a pump. Switched off the engine.

His face was turned to her. ‘You can go inside, to use the ladies’ room. If you need to.’

Nina suddenly wished she’d glanced at the fuel gauge while the engine was turned on. Had he really needed to stop, or was he testing her, to see if she’d run away or tell the attendant she’d been kidnapped or something? But she hadn’t been kidnapped, and there was no reason to think she had. She’d been rescued, after all.

‘Sure,’ she said quietly, and snapped the seatbelt free. After a moment’s hesitation she left the violin in the footwell.

There was no pump attendant at this hour. Inside the shop she watched Pope through the window, working the pump. The bored-looking college boy behind the counter gave her a quick once over, then nodded at the restroom doors.

Afterwards she lingered in the shop, staring out at Pope. Thinking about what he’d said, and what she’d have to confront.

Her father hadn’t killed her mother. It was beyond the ability of her mind to consider. They’d fought, she remembered, especially after coming to the island. There’d been times, she recalled now, that her mother had pushed Nina behind her, said things to her father like this is no life for her, she needs to be with other kids her age; but she was certain her mother had never been hit. As an older child of ten or eleven, when adults’ lies were easier to detect than ever, Nina had never listened to awkward excuses for black eyes or bruises, because there had been none.

And yet… what did she really know about her mother’s death? Her father had told Nina she’d died in the storm, in what she later came to learn was Hurricane Mitch. Her grandmother had confirmed this on the few occasions she’d alluded to it. Nina had never thought to question the story, never considered there might be any reason to investigate the circumstances of her mother’s disappearance herself. Had her grandmother been involved too in a cover up? Or had the old woman herself been lied to?

Pope went up to the window to pay rather than coming into the shop, almost as if he respected Nina’s right to be alone with her thoughts. She walked back outside, feeling the midnight chill bite her. Back in the car she waited.

He started the engine, sat for a moment without pulling away.

‘Do you trust me?’ he said.

Because you’ve just demonstrated that you trust me, Nina thought. She said, ‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll explain.’

*

Afterwards she sat pressed back as though melded to her seat, feeling as though she never wanted to move again.

Pope’s sentences had been like a collection of tiny numbing needles, each one insinuating itself into her and becoming part of her, never to be separated. The emotions began to blur until they were indistinguishable, a warm fug like the layers of anaesthetic she remembered disappearing under when she’d had a wisdom tooth extracted at seventeen.

Through it all, she was aware of a notion — not a feeling, but an abstract concept, sharp as ice in its clarity — that she had difficulty putting a name to at first. It came to her in the silence after Pope had finished.

Vindication.

The Watchers had been there. Perhaps not literally all the time, but often enough that her natural fearfulness had supplied them when they were absent. The voices, she accepted, were pathological. A product of misfiring neurones or faulty levels of neurotransmitters or something. But again, the voices tended to appear when her levels of stress were exceptionally high, and wasn’t that usually when she felt most watched?

For years, as far back as she could remember, Nina had worn guilt like a straitjacket, and she hadn’t understood why. Perhaps part of it was an irrational, child-like guilt at having failed to keep her mother alive, against the power of the storm. But for the first time now she recognised that most it was guilt about being alone; about keeping people at a distance, even those who were trying to help and understand her. And about resisting the impulse, sometimes almost overwhelming, to reach out to her father, to penetrate the incomprehensible wall he’d built between himself and the child he’d left behind.

The guilt loosened itself palpably, and it was as though her very chest was expanding, drawing in air hungrily as if it had been starved. From having been fused to her seta, she now felt as though she was about to float outwards, filling the confines of the car and spilling beyond.

The sense of liberation was terrifying.

Pope glanced across at her, caught her eye. He nodded, and in that nod she saw an understanding she’d never known anybody to manage to convey in words.

We’re the same.

They’d each lost their fathers, and in each case there’d been complexities in the relationship that hadn’t been resolved. The difference was that Pope wouldn’t get a second chance with his father. Nina would with hers, in a twisted way. And Pope was offering her that chance.

The flood of feeling — unidentifiable, intense — threatened to choke her.

‘Where are we going?’ she said.

‘New York City.’

Twenty-Seven

Sussex County, New Jersey

Monday 20 May, 11.45 pm

‘It gets us so far, but no more,’ said Purkiss.

The four of them were alone in the diner. Berg had called the owner from the back room and said that they might be there a while, that he should go home and come back in the morning. For all his surly demeanour he looked surprisingly cheerful.

‘Uncle Sam’s dime,’ he said, and left.

Kendrick was cooking something behind the counter, the sizzling from the hotplate almost difficult to hear over. Berg and Nakamura lounged in their chairs, the laptop open but in sleep mode on the table. Purkiss paced.

He often found recapitulation useful as it produced multiple slightly different drafts of a story, one or more of which might yield new insights. So he began again.

‘Pope’s father is under cover in the US, investigating something to do with interrogation techniques, around the same time a group within the CIA is conducting unauthorised trials of an interrogation-related drug in collaboration with Holtzmann Solar. The possibilities are: Pope senior infiltrated the cell within the CIA, or Holtzmann Solar itself.’

‘Or,’ said Nakamura, ‘he set things up so he was one of the trial subjects.’

‘Good point,’ said Purkiss. ‘We’ve no way of knowing at the moment which it was. My man in London is trying to get some more details about Pope senior’s last mission, but he’s probably not going to find out much more. Next, Pope’s body is fished out of the Caribbean in the wake of the hurricane.’

Berg had looked up both Hurricane Mitch and the reports of the plane wreck. The FBI files had a record of it: the remains of a Cessna piston-engined light aircraft had been found by the Guatemalan coastguard during the cleaning-up operations following the hurricane. Three bodies had been recovered: two suspected Honduran and one British national. The British man had been positively identified by SIS as Geoffrey Pope, a supposed former employee, though a file note mentioned that it was likely he was still in their pay at the time of his death. Purkiss recognised the tactic. When an agent was found dead, it was routine for the Service to deny that he was still active.

‘We know Pope junior was given a few effects that were found with his father’s body, but there’s no record of his reaction to the death, or of any attempts on his part to look into the circumstances. Darius was only seventeen years old at the time, of course, and still at school. More than fourteen years pass, and Darius gets through university and joins the Service. Has a solid, unflashy career.’

‘Biding his time, maybe,’ said Berg.

‘Quite possibly. Then, one day, starts hunting down and killing CIA operatives, three so far, all of whom Crosby implicated in the Holtzmann Solar drug trials.’

He took a moment to channel his thoughts. ‘Two possibilities. Either he’s mopping up on someone’s behalf, eliminating all traces of the trials including those who took part in the affair. In which case, at whose instigation? Was his father crooked, helping to conduct the trials, and did he somehow issue instructions to Darius to continue his work after his death and clean up afterwards? Or is somebody else pulling Pope’s strings now? The same person who sent these rogue CIA men after me and to kill Crosby?

‘The other possibility is that Pope senior was genuinely investigating the Caliban operation and managed to get word to his son about what was going on. Darius is now avenging his father, or at least vindicating him, by conducting reprisals against the people involved.’

Berg rocked forward off the back legs of her chair and stood up, stretching in frustration. ‘Either way, Purkiss, like you say this all takes us only so far. We don’t know where Pope is, who his next target is, or even if there’s going to be a next target.’

‘No.’ But there was something they were missing, something that held a clue. Purkiss was sure of it.

*

Kendrick came over carrying two trays laden with plates. An enormous dish held eggs, bacon, sausages and four steaks, almost afloat in a swamp of grease.

‘What the hell’s this?’ said Nakamura.

‘Soldier’s food.’ Kendrick began tucking in. ‘Help yourselves.’

‘Heart attack city.’

Kendrick said, his mouth full: ‘I thought you Yanks were supposed to be always stuffing your faces.’

‘You’re a forces guy?’ Nakamura said.

‘Yeah. Second Parachute Division. Two Para.’

Nakamura bobbed his eyebrows. ‘Yeah, those guys were all right. Where’d you serve?’

‘Iraq, autumn 2003 to 2006. Basra mainly.’

‘No kidding. I was with the First Marine Division. March ’03.’

Kendrick put down his fork. ‘You were there at the beginning? Part of the invasion force?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Jesus.’ Kendrick’s eyes were alight. He shifted his chair closer.

Standing near Purkiss, Berg said: ‘Boys and their games.’

Purkiss watched a group of late-night revellers career close to the wide front window of the diner and peer in before reeling away.

He said, ‘Hurricane Mitch. When exactly did it strike?’

‘It hit hard from October twenty-ninth till November third.’ She’d memorised the data from her search earlier.

‘Pope senior was found dead in the aftermath. Crosby said Caliban was terminated at the end of 1998, before Thanksgiving. Is that what ended the trials? The hurricane? Did it do some damage to the infrastructure of the project?’

She watched his face, thinking about it. Then shrugged. ‘Long shot, Purkiss.’

‘If I’m right, there’s a link to Central America. Somehow.’

‘Like I say, a long shot. The hurricane wrecked several countries. Honduras got the worst of it, but Guatemala and Nicaragua were also hit. Even Florida, though it had reduced to a tropical storm by then.’

‘Holtzmann Solar don’t have facilities in the region? A laboratory, a factory?’

‘No. But it doesn’t mean anything. Illegal activity like this, Nazi-style drug experiments… they’d be conducting it far away from the public eye.’

A phone rang, a thin warbling that startled them. Purkiss felt the sound coming from his pocket and fished the tiny clam-shaped device out. No caller ID.

He’d taken it off the body of one of the men who’d attacked them at Crosby’s cabin, the man who’d crawled up to the wall and almost shot Kendrick. Purkiss thought the man looked like the leader of the group.

He opened the phone. ‘Yeah.’ He could manage a flat, Mid-Western accent.

‘McCammon? It’s Druze.’ A man’s voice, low and rasping. ‘Where’re you?’

Purkiss switched to speakerphone. Kendrick and Nakamura got up and came over.

‘Crosby’s place, mopping up. It’s done,’ said Purkiss.

Silence for a beat. Purkiss wondered if he’d blown it. He said, ‘What’s up?’

‘Harlan and King with you?’

‘No.’

‘They left here a couple hours ago. Supposed to call in by now. I tried calling them. No answer on either of their cells.’

‘Where were they heading?’

‘The girl took a Greyhound to Washington. They were following.’

‘Problems your end?’ It was a broad enough question that Purkiss hoped it wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

‘Kind of. She got away. Couple of her asshole friends got killed. Civilians.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Where — Charlottesville, still. Hold on. Who is this?’

Purkiss killed the call.

Berg said, ‘Jesus. You took the phone from one of those guys back at — ’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you nuts? They might be tracking it with GPS as we speak.’

‘But it’s given us a way in.’

*

While Kendrick took the phone apart, crushing the memory card underfoot, Purkiss and the two agents crowded round Berg’s laptop.

Berg found it in an instant: a local online Charlottesville newspaper carried the breaking news of a fatal double shooting in the city. Two people in their twenties, names withheld for the time being. The police were appealing for a Ms Nina Ramirez to come forward as they believed she might have vital information about the killings.

Nakamura had his cell phone out. He dialled the Charlottesville PD’s number on the screen.

‘Yeah. This is Special Agent Daniel Nakamura of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling about the shootings in your jurisdiction tonight.’

He spoke quickly, giving his shield number and then mostly listening. Afterwards he put the phone away.

‘Two kids, a boy and a girl, shot dead around six this evening. Signs of forced entry. Hell, the front door of their apartment was kicked off of its hinges. Another young woman was seen by neighbours jumping out the window. Later these two beat cops get approached by this frightened girl who tells them the names and address of the two murdered kids, then runs off. The cops find the bodies, and there are photos in albums of someone who looks like the girl that ran away, labelled Nina. The dead woman’s got an address book and the cops find an address for Nina Ramirez. They visit her apartment but she’s not there.’

‘Because she’s on a Greyhound to Washington,’ said Berg.

Nakamura said, ‘Yeah, but get this. While they’re tossing Ramirez’s place, they answer a call for her from some guy who sounds like he’s a friend but would like to be more than. Calls himself Thomas Beaumont. The cops tell him to stay put, they’ll pick him up and question him, but he disappears. The cop who spoke to him on the phone said he sounded a little odd. Like he was trying on a voice, an accent, that didn’t suit him.’

Purkiss saw it in Berg’s eyes, and Nakamura’s. Pope?

Berg turned back to the laptop. Nakamura had asked the cop he’d spoken to for Ramirez’s address and any other information they had on her, and it came through as an email with attachments.

The picture, the one that was being posted on flyers throughout Charlottesville, was a head shot of an unsmiling young woman with shoulder-length black hair, facing the camera full on. Her features were fine, Hispanic; her eyes huge and at the same time wary. Haunted, even.

‘Nina Consuela Ramirez,’ read Berg. ‘Age 26. US citizen, resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, since 1998. Father, unknown. Mother Carmen Maria Ramirez, deceased. Honduran by birth.’

‘Honduran,’ said Purkiss. ‘There’s the link.’

Twenty-Eight

Interstate 95

Tuesday 21 May, 1.05 am

Pope was aware of the risks, but believed progress was impossible, in this situation as in life, without them.

Apart from the obvious risks of letting her sit with a loaded gun in the glove compartment in front of her, within easy reach, and allowing her out to use the service station restroom where she might have either run away or been recognised by the boy behind the counter if he’d heard anything about the fugitive from Charlottesville, there’d been an enormous risk in telling her all he had: about her father, about himself. But it had to be. The plan was dependent on understanding on the part of everyone involved. Pope had needed Taylor and Jablonsky to understand, just before he’d shot them; he’d needed, and achieved, Grosvenor’s comprehension just before he’d tipped her out of the window.

So Nina Ramirez needed to understand; and above all, Z had to.

*

He’d wanted to see his father’s body, but they hadn’t let him. It was barely a body any more, he supposed, after several days in the sea, subject to the predations of the water and the weather and the fish.

He was seventeen, and hadn’t seen or spoken to his father since a curt phone call on his fifteenth birthday. He lived with his mother, who as far as he knew hadn’t spoken to his father since their divorce when Darius was twelve. She delivered the news flatly, on a Tuesday afternoon after school. Your father’s dead. His plane crashed. I’m sorry.

He’d heard that bereavement could trigger anger, even hate, when the relationship with the deceased had been difficult or non-existent. He waited for the anger for a year. For fourteen years. It still hadn’t come. All he was aware of was a silent, frightening blankness.

A week after the news of his father’s death he checked his email. Not his regular account, but the secret, web-based one nobody but he knew about. Or so he thought. There, like a communication from the spirit world transmitted not through a medium but via the modernity of electronics, was a single message from his father. The message was dated twenty-first of October, two weeks before his father’s body was found.

Hello, son, it began. Happy birthday.

It wasn’t his birthday and wouldn’t be for another three months. There followed four paragraphs of utter banality, an expanded version of the things people wrote on postcards. Weather’s fine here, wherever here was. Missyou and hope to see you soon was how it ended.

Darius read the message repeatedly, printing it out and poring over it at school, during homework, late into the night. The breeziness, the sickly platitudes, were unlike anything he’d ever heard come out of his father’s mouth in his presence.

It was then he began to take an interest in cryptography.

*

He broke the code sixteen months and five days after he first read the email, and for the briefest moment the blankness inside was displaced by a rush of such euphoria it was like a drug high.

It was a difficult one, deliberately so because it had been used to outwit professionals. Yet he, Darius Pope, his father’s son, had cracked it all on his own.

His father’s son…

The message, denuded of its camouflage, read:

Darius, this is of vital importance. Ring the number below. Ask for Llewellyn. Tell him about this message and give him these co-ordinates: 17˚ 24’38”N 83˚ 55’19”W. There’s a compound with a basement, the only one on the island. Under one of the flagstones at the bottom of the steps is a mini-disc in an oilskin bag. This must be found and played. Your father.

The phone number followed.

After the euphoria ebbed, Darius felt let down. The message was almost ludicrously cloak-and-dagger. Was it some kind of joke? A warped way for his father to amuse himself at his son’s expense?

Then he remembered there’d been no clue that the original email had been in code. He’d been expected not only to break the code, but to recognise it as such in the first place. His father had trusted him that far.

Darius was aware his father worked for the diplomatic service, and was aware too that this was often thin cover for unofficial, clandestine activities. But he’d never until now fully confronted the notion that his father was a spy.

He didn’t know who Llewellyn was. Probably his father’s handler or control or whatever they called it. He never found out, because he never rang the number. Instead, Darius Pope saved his money and, in the university summer holidays of 2001, he travelled alone to the Caribbean.

The island — islet, really — was a bulge of scrubby rock little more than a mile wide and three miles long. He reached it by sailing boat, having come to an arrangement with a local yachtsman who ferried him there and back. Pope was on the island for a little over six hours, but in that time he saw no other living thing apart from the gulls that wheeled overhead.

There was no compound, only the wreckage of one. Timber and stone lay strewn about as though a city had been hit by a nuclear blast. Eventually Pope found the steps to the basement of what he’d later come to learn was called the Box.

It took him three hours to clear the rubble enough for him to reach the floor of the basement, by which time the salt sweat burned his eyes and his forearms streamed with blood from his ravaged hands. Finding the right flagstone and prising it up took a further hour.

He found the bag, the mini-disc intact inside it.

Not until two days later, when he was back home and almost unconscious with fatigue, did he listen to the recording.

*

25th October

It’s unlikely I’ll get another chance to dictate anything once the storm’s hit. It reached hurricane status yesterday off Jamaica. Portentous though it sounds, this will be my final entry.

We evacuate this evening. Apart from me, only a few of the locals, Taylor and W himself are left. Jablonsky and Grosvenor left by plane last night.

Taylor knows about me. He barely hides it. And from the way Jablonsky and Grosvenor behaved towards me before they left, I think they know too. Which means Z must. Still, though, he behaves affably towards me.

Z killed his wife yesterday. I didn’t see him do it, but I didn’t have to. When she discovered the little girl had been shipped out she became hysterical, even though it was for the best. She stormed over to the Box and demanded to know where Z had sent her. Z took her back to their house, kicking and screaming.

She hasn’t been seen since. We all know what’s happened, though we all pretend not to.

Now Z is making out his wife has left the island. When and how this happened, he doesn’t say. I could have saved her. I could have saved many if not most of the other lives that have been lost on this island. But I didn’t, because I hung on too long. I let the ultimate goal, of getting right to the head of this operation and cutting it off, rule me. And now I’ve failed utterly, and the chance to do any good at all is lost.

They’re either going to kill me, or simply strand me here. Either way I’m dead. The basement will provide little protection against the hurricane. I’d end up entombed there like a character from an Edgar Allan Poe story.

I sent the email yesterday, with Z’s express permission. Right up until I hit the ‘send’ button, I found it hard to believe he was allowing me to do so. The rules were clear. No electronic communication with the outside, for obvious reasons of security. Z read what I typed, of course, and made sure I wasn’t attaching any files. I’d said it was my son’s birthday and that I didn’t know when — if — I’d see him again. Z seemed to sympathise. He feels something for his own daughter, I’ve no doubt.

So all hope now rests with my son. If by some quirk of nature somebody is listening to this, it means my son has come through. Has shown the commitment and the downright canniness I know he’s capable of. I’ve been a terrible father, one of the worst kind, because my abuse has been not physical but of the neglectful variety. Now it’s too late to make amends. But if this is reaching anybody’s ears, please — at the risk of sounding maudlin — please tell my son that I love him.

I’m alone now, but it’s almost time for us to begin the final preparations for our departure. I won’t go quietly, whatever they have in store for me. But I will go, of that I have no doubt.

May the God I cannot believe in have mercy on them for what they’ve been doing here. And may God preserve my own soul.

*

It was the final entry in almost four hours of recorded material, most of it transcribed from his father’s memory and now committed to his. Pope had played it over, countless times, listening to nothing else through the rest of his university career, no music or recordings of seminars. He’d absorbed every detail until it was part of his own history as well as his father’s. It had taken all he had to focus on his studies and pass, comfortably but hardly with flying colours.

Towards the end of his final year he’d started to sound out the political groups on campus, ones of diverse hue. He developed a finely tuned sense of who the genuine students were and who the agents provocateurs and the talent scouts. And he’d let himself be approached — had put himself in the direct path of the recruiters, once he’d identified with them.

In October 2003, a month after graduating, Pope had signed up with the Service. And his plan began.

Twenty-Nine

Sussex County, New Jersey

Tuesday 21 May, 12.40 am

‘The man who phoned me couldn’t get hold of his two friends,’ said Purkiss. ‘It means they’re incapacitated. So Pope’s got to them.’

They were piling back into Nakamura’s Taurus, the night cool and wet around them. Berg had eyed Purkiss and said, ‘Anything else you took off those dead guys other than their phone?’

‘Of course.’ Purkiss patted the small of his back, where he’d tucked one of the handguns he’d picked up. A Glock 23. He’d seen Kendrick select one as well. Berg shook her head but did not comment.

‘Pope’s got to them,’ Nakamura said, starting the engine, ‘meaning he may have got the woman, if they were right behind her. He might have killed her by now.’

‘We have to assume otherwise.’

Kendrick: ‘And her role is what, in all this?’

‘We can’t know that,’ said Purkiss. ‘She’s significant enough that both Pope and this CIA group want her. Possibly both want her dead. But she’s too young to have been involved in the Holtzmann Solar business, even if she wasn’t a civilian, which she clearly is. She would have been ten or eleven at the time.’

‘Jeez,’ said Berg. ‘You don’t think she’s some kind of… experiment? Some leftover from the drug trial who they need to dispose of now to stop it all coming out?’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘Doubt it. Crosby told us the drug was something to do with interrogation, remember. Not the kind of thing a child would be much use as a subject for. Unless they were testing purely for side effects or something.’

‘Ah, Christ.’ Nakamura trod down harder than necessary on the accelerator, the tyres pealing on the tarmac.

Online traffic news hadn’t revealed anything particularly unusual on the roads between Charlottesville and Washington D.C. Nakamura had the radio set for updates. It was possible that the Ramirez woman had made it to the capital and Pope or the CIA men had caught up with her there. Again, nothing from the Washington news websites leaped out at them.

Washington was where they needed to head, they were agreed. Before they left the diner Purkiss said: ‘We could do with a second car.’

‘My driving a problem?’ said Nakamura drily.

‘It’ll give us more flexibility,’ said Purkiss. ‘And we’ll be a divided target, that way.’

*

Nakamura found a car rental shop that was still open. The clerk behind the counter looked up sleepily and recoiled a little at the sight of them, as if he expected to be attacked.

Purkiss chose a black Subaru. In the lot at the back Kendrick eyed it. ‘Pity. Quite fancied trying a Yank car. Mustang or Caddy or something.’

Berg said, ‘We should split up. One of us with one of you. Spread our skills.’

Kendrick said, ‘Works for me, darlin’.’ He winked at her.

Purkiss closed his eyes.

Berg said, quietly, ‘What did you say?’

‘Need to get going,’ said Purkiss.

Nakamura jerked his head. ‘Hendrix, you ride with me.’

‘Kendrick.’

‘Right.’

*

Berg took the wheel of the Subaru. Purkiss felt the excitement of discovering the Ramirez lead dissipating quickly. Over two hundred miles to Washington — and then what? All they knew, or suspected, was that Ramirez might have made it to the capital or Pope might have got to her by now.

Beside him Berg said, ‘One option we have is to call in. Have a nationwide alert put out on Ramirez.’

‘No time,’ said Purkiss. ‘It’s gone midnight. There won’t be enough people awake now to make it worthwhile, and it’ll just drive her and Pope deeper underground.’

‘What I thought,’ said Berg. ‘Danny’s monitoring police frequencies to see if anything comes up, but it’s another long shot.’

They drove in silence for a while, the Taurus in sight ahead of them. Kendrick and Nakamura were no doubt swapping war stories.

Berg said, ‘Your buddy’s an asshole.’

‘He’s all right.’

‘That kind of talk. Sexist, racist. That doesn’t go down well here.’

‘Fair point. But he’s saved my life. More than once.’

She gazed ahead. ‘I kind of know what you mean. Danny Nakamura’s done the same for me, and God knows he’s a rough diamond. But he still knows where the line is.’

After a few minutes she said, ‘You married, Purkiss?’

‘No.’

‘Kids?’

‘No. You?’

‘No kids, and divorced.’

He gave it a beat, then said: ‘You’re not the kind to make small talk for the sake of it.’

Berg sighed. ‘I’m a cliché. Work’s been everything for me, and I let my marriage go down the crapper because of it. I’m thirty-six years old, I’m a rising star… and now I do this. Throw my career away over a bunch of CIA spooks who are treading on my turf.’

‘It’s bigger than that, as you well know.’

‘Yeah.’ She gave half a laugh. ‘You English make everything sound so reasonable.’

Purkiss gazed out at the unfamiliar surroundings, saw the signs indicating they were joining Route 95.

Thirty

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C. and New York

Tuesday 21 May, 1.30 pm

Nina was starting to drowse, her body tipping forward against the sling of the seatbelt, when the voices started.

She jerked upright. Pope glanced at her, then turned his attention to the road once more.

For a few seconds she was relieved. It had been a hypnagogic hallucination, the kind of thing normal people experienced: a brief, simple noise perceived on falling asleep.

Then it came, distinctly.

‘She’s up to her old tricks again.’

A man’s voice, with a chuckle in it, somewhere ahead of her. She peered at the windshield but saw only the blurred ghost of her own face.

‘She thinks she doesn’t need to run any more.’

‘She’s wrong, honey.’ The woman’s reply came from over to the left, where Pope sat in the driver’s seat. Nina stared hard at him. The woman’s voice always held a nasty, brittle edge.

‘She’s a dead girl walking.’

‘Riding.’

‘A dead girl riding.’

Nina put her hands over her face.

‘She’s covering her face.’

‘She’s taken her hands away again.’ The woman inflected the simple, neutral words with a sneer.

Nina found the running commentary the most unbearable of all. As a child she’d joined in the maddening game of repeating everything another person said until it drove them to distraction or forced them to stay silent. Now, she couldn’t do anything to stop the voices. If she sat quietly and did nothing, the voices would -

‘She’s sitting breathing, trying to do nothing.’

‘She’s thinking how she hates us talking like this.’

Nina sat on her hands to stop them flying up to clamp over her ears. She knew from experience that the voices just got louder if she did that.

‘She’s squirming.’

‘Like she needs the john.’

‘She’s afraid he’s going to notice.’

‘She’s trying not to look at him.’

Nina dared not tell them to shut up, even silently. It only goaded them on.

Concentrate on something else. Look at the windshield wipers. They’ve slowed now to intermittent because the rain’s stopped. It’s just the spray from the road that’s getting on the glass.

‘She’s noticing the windshield wipers.’

Look at the dashboard clock. It’s one-thirty on a Tuesday night. That’s why there aren’t many cars on the highway.

‘She thinks we’ll stop if she focuses on the mundane.’

‘We’re out there.’

‘In the rain.’

‘In the cars.’

‘On the highway.’

‘We’re everywhere.’

‘Pantheism.’

Nina crammed her knuckles into her mouth and choked back a sob.

At the edge of her vision Pope was looking across again. It’s all right. He won’t know. He’ll think you’re just upset because of all that’s happened.

‘She knows what to do.’

‘She needs to stop the car.’

‘Stop the car because she’s dead.’

‘Dead people can’t ride.’

‘If the car stops then she stops.’

‘If she stops then we stop.’

Stopstopstopstopstop

The voices rose to a roaring chant.

‘Stop the car. Stop the car. Stop the car. Stop the car — ’

Nina grabbed the steering wheel and hauled it towards her.

*

Through the windshield the night slewed abruptly sideways, the yellow sodium light from the streetlamps arcing by, the beaded headlights of the cars on the opposite side of the highway across the divide spraying like sparks. Below the taunting rhythm of the voices Nina heard the yowl of rubber on tarmac and the frantic Doppler dip of car horns.

The impact rammed her against the back of her seat so hard she felt as if she were being driven through it. An instant later she flopped forward, the seatbelt wrenching across her chest. Her lashing head flicked inches short of the tip of her violin, propped upright where it was in the footwell.

‘She’s crashing. She’s bleeding. She’s dying.’

The sudden absence of movement was nearly as jarring as the collision had been. Nina sagged against the seatbelt, her head lolling stupidly on her neck. It swivelled round of its own accord and she looked at Pope. He was mouthing something at her, but his words were drowned out.

‘She’s dead. She mustn’t think she isn’t. This is the afterlife. She’s died and gone to hell.’

Close to hers, Pope’s face was white, red shadows thrown across it from the lights beyond the windshield.

*

The voices took over then, Wagnerian in their intensity. Everything else happening to her was ornamentation.

She was dragged from the car, Pope turning to speak to another man, the man shouting silently. Through the noise she managed to grab her violin by the neck through the case and haul it out after her. Light blazed at her through the darkness as she felt herself stumbling across slick road surface, her elbow supported.

The voices were less distinct the louder they became. They’d melded into one, a sexless and even inhuman grating, unintelligible as spoken language. Like a blast at close quarters they rendered her deaf.

She squatted, huddled, clasping the violin to her like an oversized infant, and stared at Pope’s legs before her.

The voices were right. She’d stopped the car, and she was dead now, and in hell.

Thirty-One

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C. and New York

Tuesday 21 May, 1.45 am

‘I don’t want your money, pal.’

The man looked cheerfully affronted. He was five feet four or so, rotund yet tough looking, with a peaked cap perched on a wiry pate.

‘Good of you,’ said Pope. ‘Thanks.’

He was using his generic American accent because although it was an effort to maintain, his grammar school vowels would be conspicuous. Particularly at a truck stop off a US interstate at a quarter to two in the morning, with a mute and shivering waif at his side.

They’d walked a mile up the road, the lights guiding him on. O’Connell’s, stuttered the pink neon when he was close to make it out through the thin steam from the blacktop. A pitted, oil-stained forecourt bristled at the periphery with seven or eight trucks of varying sizes and degrees of articulation. Below the neon sign was a low, long diner-style building with heaving movement beyond the blurred windows.

*

Pope had regained control of the wheel a second after the girl twisted it clockwise. He was almost, but not quite, quick enough to keep the Mercedes in the centre lane. As it happened, the involuntary pressure of his foot on the brake pedal caused the front to bank sideways slightly, carrying it across into the slow lane, where, as luck would have it, a car behind was accelerating to overtake.

The car behind — a Porsche roadster — rammed the rear door on the passenger side of the Mercedes at a thirty-degree angle, stoving it in and shunting the Mercedes back into the centre lane. Pope kept his foot off the brake and controlled the slide as best he could and the Mercedes stalled within a few feet. Behind and visible through Nina’s window, the Porsche too had stalled, its ballooned airbag filling the windscreen.

Pope did a quick inventory in the sudden silence. He was unhurt. The girl shuddered in the seat beside him but seemed to be moving all limbs. From what he could see of the Mercedes from the front seat, the rear door buckled inwards at a sharp angle and that side sagging awkwardly, to all intents and purposes the car was a writeoff.

He pulled the Heckler amp; Koch from beneath his seat and shoved it into his coat pocket, checked the road behind him — the cars were veering round into the fast lane — and stepped out. The meagre traffic was slowing to stare. One man leaned out his window and held his hand to his ear in a telephoning gesture but Pope shook his head, smiled and gave him the thumbs up.

One glance at the back of the car confirmed his suspicions. The rear wheel on the passenger side was flat and tilted inwards, the axle broken or at least bent. He moved forwards and opened Nina’s door. She didn’t look up at him. Gently, but with enough firmness not to leave any doubts, he took her by the shoulders and helped her out. She clutched at the violin case and he let her haul it after her.

At his side, a voice said, ‘You’re in a heap of shit, man.’

It was a young man, in his early twenties perhaps, his gelled-back hair only slightly rumpled. He was rubbing his face, his arms, his chest. His Porsche’s headlights backlit him.

‘Fucking asshole. Jumping lanes like that.’

Pope didn’t point out that the younger man had been trying to overtake in the slow lane. He calculated quickly. The fake UK driver’s licence he’d used to rent the car would hold up, as would the temporary insurance certificate he’d obtained; at least long enough for him to exchange details with the man and get going again. On the other hand -

The man had pulled a phone from the tight hip pocket of his jeans, wincing exaggeratedly as though discovering a pain in his torso he hadn’t noticed before. ‘My dad’s a lawyer, dickhead. Gonna sue your ass.’

Pope’s decision was made for him. The man stepped closer, invading Pope’s personal space, wordlessly daring him to push him or swing a punch. Still supporting Nina’s arm, Pope stiffened the fingers of his left hand into what he visualised as a shovel. He slammed the fingers into the young man’s abdomen below the breastbone, felt the gasp of minty breath as the man jackknifed. Pope caught him by the collar as he dropped, controlled his dead weight as he slid to the ground. Releasing Nina momentarily, Pope crouched beside the man, shielded by the Mercedes from the rest of the road, and twisted his neck sharply sideways.

Aware of cars sliding to a stop now, Pope ducked his head to minimise the exposure of his face and took Nina by the elbow and bundled her across the road to the hard shoulder. She squatted on her haunches when they got there, and Pope took a moment to orientate himself. The truck stop blinked in the distance.

The police would be looking not for somebody who had abandoned the scene of an accident — an offence in itself — but a killer. And they’d have eyewitness accounts of a man and a young woman carrying a case of some kind.

If he could make it to New York, he could lose himself there, even with Nina in tow. All he needed was transport to take them another hundred miles.

*

‘Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty?’

The trucker was shovelling food into his face at a steady, leisurely pace. He sat at the long counter that ran around three sides of the service area, and had been chatting to two other men when Pope and Nina came in. the two men drifted away to a larger group further down the counter.

Everybody had glanced across and appraised Pope and, of course, Nina; but when Pope had steered them over to the solitary man the rest of the customers, perhaps twelve in all, lost interest. Pope held a fan of dollar bills up between his fingers.

‘We need a ride to New York.’

The man finished swallowing, nodding as he did so. ‘Going to Queens, as it happens.’

After refusing the offer of cash, the man reapplied himself to his meal. Pope wanted to say, no, fifteen minutes is too long to wait; twenty is even worse. We need to go now. But there was no legitimate reason why the time taken to finish a truck stop meal should make any difference, unless of course Pope and Nina were on the run. So Pope sat Nina on one of the stools and propped himself beside her and ordered coffee for two. In the long mirror on the opposite side of the counter he watched the windows, waiting for the sweeping lights beyond to change to flickering blue and red.

The trucker — Joel, he’d introduced himself as — made enthusiastic recommendations about the meatloaf, the cherry pie, and Pope answered him politely but non-committally. In answer to the inevitable question he said he was Mark Logan — the name on his driver’s licence — and that the lady, his girlfriend, was Carmela. Her mother in Brooklyn was seriously ill and they were travelling overnight to see her; that was why she sat silent and jumpy. Their car had broken down five miles back; the AA were taking care of it, but it would take a couple of days to fix.

‘Pissy luck, man,’ said Joel, sounding genuinely sorry.

The minute hand of the clock on the wall swept impossibly quickly through ten minutes, then fifteen. Pope felt the knot of tension in his stomach start to unfurl and spread branches.

He glanced at Nina. She sat resting her elbows on the counter, her head lowered, the coffee untouched before her. She hadn’t said anything since the crash. Every now and again she’d look up, but not at him; her eyes would flick about as though following an invisible point of darting light.

He understood that this was more than a delayed reaction to the violence of the last half a day, the horror and confusion of what he’d revealed to her about her parents. The girl was ill.

Pope had known a boy at school who’d started to behave oddly at the age of fifteen: his grades had begun to drop, he’d starting cutting himself off from the few friends he had, and he used to sit in one corner of the classroom filling both exercise and text books with doodles. One day the teacher had confronted him when he started drawing on the walls, and he’d laughed and run out. He hadn’t returned to the school, but a few years later Pope had met him by chance in the street. The boy had put on an enormous amount of weight, walked with a peculiar slow deliberation, and his eyes seldom blinked. He’d shown no recognition whatsoever when Pope met his gaze.

Curious, Pope did a little digging and discovered the boy had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He learned that the symptoms — hallucinations, delusions — could exist on a spectrum and were present sometimes in people who were otherwise highly functioning.

The trucker, Joel, was bantering with the blowsy blonde behind the counter as he settled the bill. Pope leaned towards Nina and said, ‘It’s the voices, isn’t it?’

She didn’t look at him, quite, but her eyes flicked sideways in his direction, and her breathing caught.

‘We can talk later, if you want,’ he murmured. ‘I know what it’s like. I hear them, too.’

It was, by his calculation, only the third lie he’d told her. He’d lied earlier when he told her the CIA men pursuing her wanted her dead.

And he’d lied when he told her: You can survive this.

Thirty-Two

Manhattan, New York City

Monday 20 May, 10.25 pm

Giordano’s phone rang as he was heading down the corridor to the offices where Campbell and Barker were being kept. He was in the Company’s Midtown base, a cleverly anonymous warren fronted by an old, apparently residential brownstone.

It was Naomi. ‘Boss, can you talk?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You may have heard already, but there’s been a shooting out in New Jersey. Four Company agents dead.’

‘What?’

‘A real firefight. Some kind of explosion, M16s being used, the works. At the home of an ex-agent, Dennis Crosby.’

‘What the hell happened?’

‘I don’t have much else at the moment. One of my contacts in the Jersey PD who I’d primed to look out for Purkiss phoned it in a few minutes ago. Happened around six this evening.’

‘I haven’t been told any of this… Naomi, thanks. Keep me up to date.’

‘Sure.’

Giordano paused in the corridor, gripping his forehead. Then he continued down to the office he was looking for, the floorboards wincing under his bulky stride. He knocked on the door and opened without waiting for a reply.

The two men, Campbell and Barker, sat with another agent.

‘Giordano,’ he said to the third man. ‘Out. I want to talk to these guys alone.’

*

Afterwards he wandered back and found Krugmann, the head of Midtown, in conversation with a group of people in an open plan area.

‘A word,’ he said. Krugmann glared at him craggily. He dismissed the others and took Giordano to his own office, closing the door. Giordano knew the man resented his intrusion, felt the Langley officer was pissing all over his territory. That was too bad. Whatever you need, you’ve got. No restrictions, the Director had said.

‘They talk to you?’ Krugmann said.

‘Never mind that. Four operatives killed in a firefight three hours ago? You were going to tell me this — when?’

Krugmann wiped a hand across his face. ‘You just got here, Ray. And with the greatest respect, what’s it got to do with you?’

‘What’s it — ? With slightly less respect, Bob, I’m investigating the systematic assassination of until tonight three Company executives. Investigating on the express orders of the Director. So that’s what the shooting of four more agents has to do with me.’

Krugmann gazed at him from under tortoise lids. ‘You’d better sit down,’ he said, indicating a chair and sinking into one himself.

Giordano sat.

‘What were the agents doing there? At this Crosby’s house?’

Krugmann steepled his fingers, touched the tips to his lips. ‘We don’t know.’

‘Don’t know.’

‘That’s right, Ray.’ Krugmann leaned back in his swivel chair, clasping his hands behind his head, sighing as he stretched. ‘There was no sanctioned operation. These four men were acting on their own.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Giordano stared at Krugmann. ‘A freelance cell.’

‘Something like that, it appears. Yes.’ Krugmann’s tone dropped. ‘These guys were from New York, which means I and the other borough chiefs are up to our eyelashes in the shit right now.’

Giordano flicked his fingers in a come hither gesture. ‘Give me some facts. Names.’

*

Despite his bulk he could work quickly, Giordano, and he absorbed and assimilated the information as he read it off the reports. One fact caught his attention and he paused at it.

The police responded to an anonymous call from an individual claiming to be a Federal agent.

There was nothing unusual about a person phoning in anonymously with information, nor with such a person living out their fantasies and pretending to be someone they weren’t. But it made Giordano think of something.

To Krugmann he said, ‘Keep Campbell and Barker in the building. I need to speak to them again for a minute.’

Campbell had told him there’d been a woman on the scene. He’d caught only a glimpse — he’d been buried beneath an airbag at the time — but she’d looked tough, like a professional.

Giordano pulled out his phone and called Naomi. She’d work more quickly than anyone here could, even if she was more than two hundred miles away.

‘Yeah. Get me someone in the FBI. The Director if you can, but somebody more junior will do if necessary. Just not too junior.’

In twenty minutes, and with only the briefest recourse to the co-operation is in the interests of both our services shtick, Giordano had a name. Two names, in fact. Barbara Berg and Daniel Nakamura. Both Special Agents with the Bureau who’d gone off the radar earlier this afternoon, and were now operating without sanction.

They were the same two agents who’d pulled Purkiss in for questioning at the airport.

They had Purkiss with them, he was sure of it. And that made finding him easier, because three people were more conspicuous than one.

‘I need an office,’ said Giordano. ‘I’m going to be here for a while. This one will do.’

Thirty-Three

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C and New York

Tuesday 21 May, 2.05 am

The truck was an eighteen-wheel behemoth, its white refrigerated trailer like a carapace from beneath which the head-like red cab protruded. Pope saw all manner of decorations through the windscreen as they approached; multicoloured disco lights, a statuette of a nude woman on the dashboard that no doubt gyrated when the engine was running, a buffalo skull mounted on the inner roof.

It was unlikely transport for two people on the run, so it would do.

Joel sang tunelessly under his breath as he helped up first Nina and then Pope. The inside was trimmed in red leather. Pope pulled the door closed and then shifted against it to give Nina room in the middle. She lowered her violin case into the footwell.

Since he’d mentioned the voices, she’d been noticeably different: readier to comply with his suggestions immediately, and even making eye contact on occasion. He had some way to go to get her back, but he felt he was making a start.

The engine started with a great coughing rumble, the entire vehicle shivering slightly as it shook itself awake. The cab smelled of onions and spearmint and diesel.

‘Rock and roll, people,’ said Joel, and the beast began to pull out.

Through the window Pope saw, back don the interstate, the massing emergency vehicles. The traffic cops were already setting up, diverting the stream of nighttime cars around the scene.

‘Damn,’ said Joel, staring at the rear view mirror. ‘That’s some fender bender.’

For a moment Pope thought the man would turn the truck round to investigate; but he joined the northward flow.

Joel was going to Queens. Pope had told him his destination was Brooklyn, but he intended at the last minute to ask to be dropped off in Manhattan. Just in case the driver was in radio contact with anybody during the journey and mentioned where he was taking his passengers.

‘So, Mike,’ said the driver. ‘What do you do for a living?’

‘It’s Mark,’ said Pope. Had the man been testing the cover name deliberately? But why would he? ‘I’m in insurance.’

‘Yeah? No kidding.’ Joel barked a laugh. ‘My first wife ran off with one of you guys.’

Pope said nothing.

‘You want to watch this guy, honey,’ Joel went on. ‘Always on the road. No telling what he gets up to.’ He gave Pope a leering wink.

Two more attempts at starting conversation followed before Joel gave up with an invisible shrug.

For ten minutes the only sounds were the rumble of the truck’s engine, the hissing of the tyres on the wet road and the tinny music from the radio, accompanied now and again by Joel’s off-key humming. Pope glanced at Nina. Yes, there was definite eye contact, if not yet a smile.

At two fifteen — Pope noted the time on the digital dashboard clock — the report came, cutting through the muzak. Joel reached across and turned up the volume.

‘- Issued a missing person’s report on a Ms Nina Ramirez, age twenty-six, height five two, weight one hundred and fifteen pounds, dark hair, eyes brown. Ms Ramirez is believed to be suffering from mental health problems and was last seen in Charlottesville, Virginia, at nine p.m. yesterday evening. Police believe she may have been heading in the direction of Washington D.C. and may pose a risk to herself.’

Pope listened hard. There was no mention of anybody of his description, nor of anyone else who might be with her.

The report ended with a telephone number and the music faded back in.

Nina stared up at Pope. Over her head he saw Joel’s profile, the jaw muscles bunched.

*

At two twenty-one — again by the dashboard clock — Joel said: ‘I got to call this in, man.’

Pope stared at him, saying nothing.

As though he’d been asked a question Joel said, ‘You both look like adults. But if she’s mentally sick… ah, man. I got to do the right thing.’

Nina blinked, glanced up at Pope again, looking confused.

Pope said, ‘It’s not her. My wife’s name is Carmela. She’s not missing. She’s right here.’

Joel shook his head. ‘I saw the way she reacted. It was her name they mentioned in the broadcast.’ He whistled thinly through his teeth. ‘Can’t ignore a missing person report when the person’s sat right up here beside me.’ As though addressing a child he said to Nina, ‘What’s your name, honey?’

She didn’t reply.

Pope said, ‘Look, Joel. Just keep on driving. Get us to New York. I’ll pay you, like I offered before.’

Another shake of the head.

‘Two hundred dollars.’

A pause; then the driver said, ‘Sorry. Can’t.’

There’ll be a bigger reward for turning her in, Pope thought.

Pope drew the Heckler amp; Koch from his pocket and transferred it to his left hand. Stretching his arm across the back of the seat behind Nina, he levelled the muzzle at Joel’s head.

‘Drive.’

*

Nina recoiled when she saw the gun and it was all Pope could do to keep it trained on the driver. She twisted round and away from his arm, straining against her seatbelt.

Joel didn’t jerk away, didn’t spin the wheel in fright. He simply muttered, ‘Holy shit,’ drawing out the first syllable.

‘He’s going to turn you in to your father’s people,’ said Pope, keeping his voice low and matter-of-fact. ‘That message on the radio didn’t originate with the police. How would they know you were headed for Washington? It’s the CIA. They must have found the men I killed by the side of the road.’

At the mention of CIA Joel’s eyes widened a fraction. Pope thought the driver realised he was dealing with two crazies here, not just one.

‘Get us to New York,’ Pope said in the same voice, to Joel this time. ‘No tricks. No attempts to alert anybody to the situation. Then I’ll let you go, unharmed.’ He’d dropped the American accent.

In the dim light of the cab’s interior, Pope saw sweat sheen the man’s forehead under the peak of his cap.

Nina hunched forward, avoiding contact with Pope’s outstretched arm behind her as though it was a python trying to drape itself across her neck. Pope kept his gaze fixed on the driver’s face. The man was scared, but he was keeping his cool. It might mean he was planning something stupid.

After ten minutes Joel said, ‘Shit.’

‘What?’

‘Got to stop for gas.’

Pope leaned forward slightly and darted a look at the fuel gauge. The needle was touching the red and a light had come on.

‘Why didn’t you fill up back at the truck stop?’

‘Too expensive. My employers won’t pay up if I bring them receipts from that place.’ Joel nodded at the windscreen. ‘There’s a gas station five miles ahead. I always fill up there when I’m doing a night run to the city. Grab a last cup of coffee.’

Pope thought about it. There didn’t seem to be anything he could do. The last thing they needed was to run out of fuel in the middle of the Interstate.

The red and white lights of the service station came into view while they were still a mile or so away. Joel hauled the truck into the forecourt. Pope watched for a telltale flick of the headlights, perhaps a prearranged distress signal to be used in case of carjacking, but there was none.

The truck hissed to a stop beside a diesel pump. Pope said, ‘We’re all getting out. I’m putting the gun in my pocket, but it’s there and I’ve got my hand on it. I will use it if I have to.’

‘Yeah.’ The driver opened his door, looked across to see if it was all right for him to climb down. Pope jumped down himself and helped Nina to the ground, making no comment when she brought the violin with her. Quickly Pope led her round to the other side of the truck, where Joel had the nozzle in his grip and was already feeding fuel into the tank.

Pope watched the road as the flow continued. Vehicles were sweeping by mostly singly now, many of them delivery trucks like this one. There were no other cars in the service station forecourt. Pope had seen a clerk seated behind a counter inside the shop.

Pope looked at the digital display on the pump. The amount of fuel delivered was advancing in drips.

‘That’s enough,’ he said to Joel. The driver withdrew the nozzle, taking his time, and replaced the cap.

Pope nodded and Joel began walking towards the building. Pope kept a few feet behind, Nina at his side, the violin clasped in front of her.

The shop was like a small supermarket, its brightly lit aisles stocked with foods, pharmaceuticals and household products. Behind the counter perched another college boy like the one at the first station Pope and Nina had stopped at. This one looked fresher, as though he’d started his shift recently after a night’s worth of sleep. He watched them with mild curiosity. Pope supposed they made an odd trio, and they’d certainly be remembered later. That didn’t matter.

Above the counter a closed-circuit television monitor was split into four screens, showing various areas of the forecourt, the interior of the shop and the three of them plus the clerk. Pope watched Joel on the monitor handing across a credit card. The resolution wasn’t great but he could see nothing in the man’s eyes to suggest he was signalling the clerk in any way.

Pope kept his hand around the butt of the Heckler amp; Koch in his jacket pocket.

The clerk tore off a receipt and handed it to Joel. Joel turned and muttered to Pope, ‘I have to use the john.’

‘No.’ Pope inclined his head towards the exit.

‘Jeez, man. I always do here. I’m busting.’

‘Too bad.’

Behind Joel the clerk was frowning a little. It was time to go.

As Pope stepped aside to let the truck driver go ahead of him he noticed something about the clerk’s frown. It was no longer directed at him. He looked at the boy’s face, followed his line of sight through the glass.

At the rim of the forecourt, at each of the two points designated Entry and Exit, a car had pulled up and parked, blocking the access to and from the road. As Pope watched, men emerged from each car, crouching.

Like street lights being turned on in sequence, a silent flashing red and white light appeared on the roof of each car.

Thirty-Four

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C and New York

Tuesday 21 May, 2.35 am

Nina couldn’t be sure of the sequence of events in the next few seconds. Each separate experience was like an individual card in a deck that had been rapidly shuffled.

Strobing lights washed through the windows and across the faces of Pope and the truck driver and the clerk.

The clerk shouted something incomprehensible.

The driver, Joel, shouted, terrifyingly close to her, He’s got a gun get down he’s kidnapped us.

Pope pulled, hard, on her arm, the way she had to pull hard on the old-fashioned toilet chain in her first home, and she felt herself dropping.

From her position on the lino floor, tiny and helpless, sprawled over her violin case she saw the looming shape of the clerk above the counter, something in his hands — a gun…

She heard the ch-chak of the gun’s slide action less than a second before it was drowned out by a crashing boom directly above her, one that made her clasp her hands over her ears to shut out the noise, both of the explosion and of her screams.

From where she was on the floor Nina could see the gap in the counter giving entry to the space behind it, and she watched the clerk slam back against the racks of cigarettes and liquor bottles on the wall behind him and drop onto his butt on the floor, where he sat propped, his legs splayed, one eye staring at her, the other missing along with half his head.

Her screams seemed to engulf her, becoming the whole of her, and although she blocked her ears and closed her eyes against them they penetrated through.

Something nagged at her, through the screaming and the horror, and she realised she had to pay attention to it.

Somebody was asking her something, over and over.

*

‘Please, don’t.’

Nina rolled over and brought her legs up so that she was hunched on her heels on the floor, over the violin case.

Three feet in front of her she could see the backs of Pope’s legs. Beyond him, at eye level with her, she saw the chubby truck driver, Joel. He was kneeling, facing Pope, but looking past him and at Nina. His cap had been dislodged sideways to reveal a sunburned, peeling bald pate above the ring of scrubby hair.

His hands were clasped and shaking in front of him.

‘Please,’ he whispered again. ‘Don’t do it. Don’t kill me.’

He was staring at her. Asking her not to kill him.

She shook her head. What did she mean? She hoped he understood.

Nina watched Pope extend his hand, and for an instant she thought he was reaching to help the man up.

The gun roared and bucked slightly in his hand again and Nina fell back, hands coming up around her ears once more.

*

A half hour passed, sluggishly, like the time spent waking up from an anaesthetic. Except it couldn’t have been a half hour; it was more, Nina realised later, like a few seconds.

She was still on the floor, the violin pressed to her, but she’d crawled back into the adjacent aisle to get away from the horrors on the floor where she’d been earlier. Pope stood six feet away, slightly crouched, staring out the windows.

‘Nina.’

He didn’t turn when he said it, and for a moment she though the voices had come back.

‘Nina.’ This time his head turned a fraction, and his voice was louder. ‘Stay down but come over here.’

She heard, but couldn’t process the words.

Pope stooped and backed over to her, reaching her in an instant. With his free hand he grabbed hers and dragged her back towards the window, forcing her to duckwalk to keep up.

When they reached the wall with the windows, rows of potato chips and candy bars arrayed in front of her face, he pulled her so that she stood. She felt him step behind her. One of his hands gripped her shoulder.

The gun barrel touched her ear.

*

She’d seen it countless times in movies, and had thought it must be one of the most terrifying experiences possible. But now, with the ring of the barrel an inch from the side of her head, radiating warmth and the smell of metal, she felt nothing. No fear. No numbness, even.

His voice murmured in her hair beside her ear.

‘I know this is horrible, but I swear to you, it’s a bluff. I’m not going to shoot you. I’m not going to let those men out there hurt you. There are four of them. They’re not police. They’re your father’s men. This is the only way to keep them at bay for the time being.’

His words were clear as ice, their meaning as well as their sound. She gave a tiny nod.

Through the glass, she could make out silhouettes around the two cars. Police cars, they looked like, with their cherry-top lights; except that they didn’t appear to have police markings. The silhouetted shapes — there might have been four, as Pope said; she couldn’t be sure — were hunched against the cars, again just as she’d seen in the movies. The siege posture, she thought of it as.

As she watched, the silhouettes shifted position, two of them detaching themselves from the car and advancing a little at a stoop. Both men carried guns, held low and in both hands.

Pope straightened further, pulled Nina closer. The men stopped, remained where they were.

Something didn’t make sense to her.

‘I had to kill those two,’ Pope said.

She nodded.

‘The clerk was going to shoot me. The truck driver would have made a run for it at some point and those men outside would have got in.’

He was telling her this, Nina knew, because he needed her to trust him. This she understood.

But still, something about the situation was wrong. Something about the tactic he was using.

She felt him step crabwise to the left and allowed him to shuffle her along with him. They reached the counter. Nina kept her gaze on the forecourt, not wanting to look at the body of the clerk. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pope reach across and lift the handset of the landline phone perched in its base beside the till.

In the faint reflection in the glass, she saw him hold the phone high. He’d released her shoulder, but his right hand still touched the gun barrel to her head.

Across the forecourt one of the men straightened a little, then seemed to say something to his friend. The man called something across to the other tow shapes near the second car.

One of them was fumbling with something which she realised from the tiny blue light was a cell phone.

Two minutes passed. Nina became aware for the first time of faint, tinny music coming from a radio somewhere behind the counter.

She understood what was happening. The men outside were locating the phone number for the gas station.

The phone rang in Pope’s hand, shrill and startling. He hit the receive button and spoke immediately.

‘Back off and give us safe passage in one of your cars. If you advance any further or don’t comply with my instructions, I’ll kill the girl.’

Nina couldn’t make out the reply at the other end but she heard Pope interrupt: ‘No negotiation. You have two minutes. Leave the keys to both cars in the car in front of the exit and then all of you go over and sit in the other car.’

Another tiny burst of noise came through the receiver. Pope said, ‘Two minutes, starting now. Any longer and I shoot her.’

As he lowered the phone, Nina saw two sets of headlights sweep down the slip road leading towards the forecourt.

*

‘Time’s running out.’

The phone had rung again. Nina had watched the two new cars pull up outside the entrance and a woman emerge from one of them. One of the men had advanced toward her and from his gestures was clearly telling her to back off.

Nina strained her hearing, starting to become accustomed to the sound coming from the receiver. She made out a few words from the other end. Not with us… get rid of them… more time.

Two men had joined the woman from the cars. An urgent argument was developing.

Pope had lowered the phone again. In the glass his face was in shadows and Nina couldn’t read it.

She said, her voice stronger than she’d believed possible: ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Pope. ‘These new people seem to be different.’

‘Police?’

‘Perhaps.’ He sounded unconvinced.

The two remaining original men — my father’s men, Nina reminded herself — stayed out of the argument, keeping close to their car on the other side, watching Pope and Nina in the window. Nina wondered if Pope was considering making a move now that two of the men were otherwise occupied. But he kept still, his hand with the phone resting on her shoulder, and the gun barrel always gently touching her ear.

Pope’s two-minute ultimatum had long passed. The scene at the entrance was becoming more fraught. Both sides were squaring up, pushing against the space between them. Nina could hear voices raise din anger but couldn’t make out the words.

The woman held something up. Light glinted off it. A detective’s shield. So they were cops.

The two men took a step back, and then things happened fast.

The two men with the woman crouched and lifted their arms, guns levelled. The two original men aimed their weapons back.

The two remaining men began advancing across the forecourt toward the building.

Pope dropped the phone and put his forearm across Nina’s throat, lightly, behind the neck of the violin case. He drew her across him. The movement made her stagger slightly and her violin case sweep the rows of candy bars and chips in front of her below the windows, scattering them noisily to the floor.

The men, her father’s men, were halfway across the forecourt. Over at the cars the standoff continued.

Nina twisted her neck in discomfort. As she did so she glanced up at the CCTV monitor above the counter over to the left.

One of the split-screen images showed the back of the shop. A man was sidling down one of the aisles, gun arm extended.

Nina yelled, ‘Behind us.’

Thirty-Five

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C and New York

Tuesday 21 May, 2.05 am

Berg’s phone trilled on the dashboard. She put it on speaker.

They’d been driving for over an hour, the interstate appearing as vast and as empty as any road Purkiss had seen, despite the steady flow of cars. The signs said they were nearing Philadelphia.

Nakamura’s voice came across. ‘Just picked up a police report from Philly. Car smash here on 95 heading north, with one guy dead. The other driver left the scene. Get this. The cops say the dead guy didn’t die in the crash. Witnesses saw him get out the car and start arguing with the other driver. Next thing he’s on the ground. And the cops found a gun in the abandoned car, a Glock.’

Berg said, ‘Huh. But it still doesn’t mean — ’

‘Same witnesses say the driver left the scene with someone else. A skinny teenage boy, or possibly a young woman.’

‘That’s them.’ Purkiss sat up, feeling the adrenaline spike. ‘Ramirez, and probably Pope.’

Berg said, ‘Danny, do you have a licence plate on the abandoned car?’

‘Waiting on it from the local cops.’

‘It’ll be up ahead,’ said Berg to Purkiss. ‘Keep your eyes open.’

In a minute Nakamura’s voice returned. ‘Cops ran the plate through DMV. It’s from a car rental place in Charlottesville.’

‘Our girl all right, plus whoever’s with her,’ said Berg. ‘Danny, get a — ’

‘Description of the person who rented it. Yeah, I’m already on it, Berg. Eat my dust.’

Berg grinned. She glanced across at Purkiss.

‘Good feeling, huh? When you’re closing in. You’re kind of like a cop. You know how it is.’

She put her foot down a little. Nakamura’s Taurus was a couple of cars behind, keeping up easily in the relative lightness of the traffic.

Nakamura came back on the line. ‘Rental place is an all-nighter, but the guy there wasn’t on shift when the car was rented. However, he checked the records and it was booked out to a Douglas Torrance. British licence holder. The photo from his licence is being scanned and sent to me. I’ll forward it so Purkiss can see.’

He rang off. When the phone sounded again Berg said, ‘That’s a text,’ and Purkiss took it and looked at the screen.

The photo was blurred and distorted from being first photocopied and then scanned, but there was no doubt who it was. Pope.

‘Our guy?’

‘Yes.’

*

Berg and Purkiss spotted the flashing lights at the same time.

Purkiss had been lost in thought. So Pope had taken the girl, but hadn’t killed her despite having had ample opportunity to do so. Did she know something he needed to find out? But if so, where was he taking her? Why hadn’t he simply interrogated her where he’d snatched her? Or was she in some way his accomplice, travelling with him voluntarily? That made even less sense.

‘There,’ said Berg.

Across the highway a petrol station cut a familiar sight, a single large haulage truck in the forecourt. Less familiar were the two cars with active flashers parked, it appeared, across both points of entry and exit.

‘Worth a look,’ said Purkiss. Berg turned off and as she did so, rang Nakamura. His voice came across the speakerphone.

‘Nothing about it on the police frequencies.’

The slip road, or whatever they called it over here, led to a traffic circle beneath the highway. Berg navigated it, the Taurus close behind, and came off on the road running past the service station. As they approached Purkiss saw two men crouched near the closer car. Plain clothes, with no external markings on them or their vehicle to suggest they were law enforcement.

Both men were armed with handguns. One was talking into a mobile phone. They turned to look at the two cars as they drew up.

One of the men, the one without the phone, strode over as Berg killed the engine. She opened the door and the man said, ‘Police business. Get back in the car and drive away.’

Purkiss was about to climb out himself when he saw movement in the window of the building beyond the pumps. He peered through the windscreen. Two figures, there: a man holding a smaller person, a woman, in front of him.

He eased open the door and slipped out, staying low to the ground. Behind him he heard Berg snap, ‘FBI. Let’s see some ID.’

Purkiss moved behind the car, through the headlights of the Taurus which had pulled up behind, and began to make for the grass verge that ran along one edge of the forecourt’s perimeter, towards the side of the building.

*

The verge was deep in shadow and he made it without challenge. Only once did he glance at the window on his way. A fair-haired man, holding a woman with his arm across her neck, a gun pressed to her head. The features weren’t distinguishable but he knew it was Pope and Ramirez.

A fire door was set in the back wall of the low, long building. He reached for it, then thought better. It would be alarmed, especially at this hour. Purkiss moved along the wall until he saw a small window. He ran a few paces and jumped, catching the ledge and hauling himself so that he perched on it. The glass was opaque but he could make out a restroom beyond.

Purkiss stripped off his coat, the one he’d borrowed from Nakamura, and balled it around his fist. Gripping the open fan window above him for stability, he pressed the covered fist against the glass of the larger window, increasing the pressure steadily until he felt and heard a tiny crack. He eased off, then pressed again. The glass splintered and gave way, fragments shattering on the porcelain below. Purkiss held his breath. Distantly, from the other side of the building, he could hear angry voices shouting, Berg’s predominant.

Keeping his hand covered with the coat he broke away as many pieces of the glass as he dared, tossing the shards away behind him into the weeds. When he’d created a gap big enough to fit through he put the coat back on again and crawled through, sending further splinters skittering into the restroom. He dropped to the floor and paused at the door, drawing the Glock.

A short passage led from the restroom to the shop beyond. Purkiss stopped at the springloaded door at the end of the passage and looked through the glass panel at eye level.

Across three or four aisles, Pope stood at the window, looking out. Almost hidden in front of him was a woman’s slight figure. Pope’s right hand held a gun steady against the side of her head.

With his fingertips Purkiss pushed against the door. The springs were well oiled and there was no sound as the door opened. He passed through quickly, controlling the closing movement.

Pope presented his back to Purkiss. A single shot would have to suffice to take him down; one from closer range would be better. Pope was turned slightly to his right, holding the girl directly in front of him, so an approach from the left would be less likely to risk hitting her. Purkiss ducked and edged along the aisle towards the front of the shop.

Ramirez screamed.

The noise was like a gunshot, and for a fraction of a second Purkiss was immobilised as if he’d been hit. He heard her voice — behind us, there’s a man behind us — and at the same instant saw the CCTV monitor above the counter, his frozen figure gazing back.

Careless.

Pope was fast, spinning and opening fire as Purkiss emerged at the end of the aisle and brought his own gun up. Purkiss was forced to drop again as the bullets smashed into the shelves around and above him, ripping through packets and tins, sending a billow of flour and sugar overhead. Purkiss rose again and took an instant to aim before firing, aiming not at Pope — he’d swung the girl round, not quite in front of him, and the risk of hitting her was too great — but at the window behind him while making sure his aim was high enough to avoid the petrol pumps beyond. Purkiss ducked once more as the window exploded outwards, the shock and noise meant to disorientate Pope even fractionally.

Purkiss came round the end of the aisle at a crouching run, aware of shouting drawing closer through the shattered window, and saw Pope with his gun raised, looking back through the window hole. A body lay near his feet, a civilian. Pope’s free hand was on the woman’s shoulder. She cowered, clutching something in front of her — an instrument case — and staring at Purkiss.

‘Ms Ramirez,’ he yelled. ‘Come over here.’

Pope looked across at him and simultaneously pulled the woman closer to him and brought the gun to bear. Purkiss ducked behind the shelves again, felt the shot sing over his head. How many was that, so far? Five or six? Pope’s gun looked like a Hockler; that could mean up to fifteen rounds. Ten left, plus whatever he had spare.

Gunfire crashed and sprayed the wall at the back of the shop, blasting away plaster. Purkiss risked a raise of his head and saw the back of Pope’s head again: he was facing through the shattered window, firing back. Two shots; a third.

Ramirez’s white, frightened face stared back at Purkiss again.

Purkiss beckoned her. Her eyes widened.

‘He’ll kill you,’ Purkiss called. ‘Get over here. I’ll get you away.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Nina.’ Pope half-turned, still focused on whomever was out there. Another salvo of shots came and plaster dust erupted from the ceiling.

‘Get over here now. You’ll get killed at any moment.’

She broke free then, only her head visible and moving over the top of the aisle. Purkiss moved to the front to meet her at the end.

‘Nina.’ Pope’s voice had risen to a roar.

She was six feet from Purkiss now, but she stopped and glanced back. He reached forward and grabbed her wrist roughly, yanking her past him and behind him. She was still clasping that case. He moved to the end of the aisle she’d emerged from and peered round.

Pope’s shot whined past his cheek and drove him back.

A high-pitched, repetitive rising tone started up, cutting across the aftershock of the gunfire. The rear door alarm.

Purkiss moved back around the fronts of the aisles to where Nina was hovering. He put his hand on her head and pushed her down, feeling her flinch, just as the door into the back passage opened and a man emerged. He’d come in through the fire door.

Thirty-Six

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C and New York

The man held a gun in a two-handed grip.

‘Give me the girl.’

‘Drop the gun,’ said Purkiss, the Glock levelled.

‘Send the girl over here.’

Purkiss shot him in the chest, a double tap, sending him back hard against the wall. He gripped Ramirez by the collar and hauled her up. He’d been intending to send her out through the fire door on her own while he dealt with Pope. Now that wasn’t an option.

Keeping himself slightly ahead of her he shouldered open the door into the passage. Halfway down was the restroom he’d come through, and at the end was the open fire door. Behind them he could hear the gunfire continuing.

Purkiss ran to the door and looked out. Nobody there. He pulled the woman stumbling after him and made her follow him hugging the wall to the corner and around the side. They encountered nobody.

Further shots came from the front of the building, and it took Purkiss a moment to realise that he’d let himself be misled, that the shooting at the moment didn’t involve Pope, because Pope had followed them through the fire door. His shape loomed at the corner they’d just passed and he had his gun raised, but wasn’t shooting because Ramirez was between him and Purkiss. Purkiss fired past her and Pope flinched back.

Purkiss dragged Ramirez to the corner ahead and round to the front of the building. The forecourt was littered with spent shell casings. A body lay near the front door of the shop. Purkiss and Ramirez moved further out and he saw movement through the shop’s wrecked front window. Berg and Kendrick, stalking between the aisles, Berg recoiling as a shot came by her.

Purkiss backed away from the building, shielding Ramirez, his gun aimed at the corner where he expected Pope to emerge. He heard a voice behind him near the pumps — Purkiss — and glanced round.

Nakamura sat beside one of the pumps, his lips drawn back in a grimace. His hands clutched his lower leg, soaked black in the shadows.

‘Bastards shot me.’

‘You dying?’

‘Fuck that.’

Keeping his gaze on the corner of the building, Purkiss said, ‘Ms Ramirez. Nina. Stay with this man. He’s an FBI agent. He’ll protect you.’

He risked a glance at her to make sure she understood. Then he began moving back towards the side of the building. Through the window, the cat and mouse appeared to be continuing.

Pope wasn’t round the side. Purkiss advanced to the back, darted a look round. He wasn’t there, either.

Purkiss thought it likely that Pope had run out of ammunition, which was why he hadn’t come after them immediately when they’d made it round the front. He also assumed Pope was going back for the gun belonging to the man Purkiss had shot inside the shop.

Purkiss made his way to the fire door, peered through. No sign of anybody in the passage.

Two shots came, close together, from the front of the building. Not from within.

From far away Purkiss heard his name being called, as a grinding rumble started up.

Purkiss ran, sprinting round the other side of the building to complete a circuit. As he came round the corner he saw three things at once:

Nakamura had crawled on his belly away from the pumps and was lying prone, his gun extended awkwardly in shaking hands.

Ramirez had stepped off to the side and was huddled with her instrument case, frozen in headlights.

The gargantuan truck, the only vehicle in the forecourt, had turned in a wide arc and was doubling back, heading straight towards the pumps. At the wheel, high in the cab, was Pope.

Purkiss was running even as he raised the gun and fired at the windscreen, but the first shot glanced off the frame above it and after that the Glock’s hammer clicked down emptily, once, twice.

He continued running, aiming in a direct line for the truck, blotting out the horror of what was about to happen, of what was now happening as the front wheels reached Nakamura’s prone and haplessly scrambling body and rocked over it, whipping him underneath, the cab rising and dropping almost imperceptibly as he disappeared and his scream was cut off.

Purkiss drew level with the driver’s door of the cab and dropped the useless gun and leaped up and got a grip on the handle, pulling it open and hanging for a moment in the air, swinging off the door, before hauling himself into the seat — Pope wasn’t there, he’d bailed out through the passenger door — and seeing the pumps looming as he scrabbled for whatever served as a handbrake in a behemoth like this. He found the handle and pulled on it with all his strength, at the same time spinning the steering wheel into the direction of the slide that was already beginning.

The truck roared as it fishtailed sideways, the dozen-and-a-half wheels setting up a banshee howl as their rubber clawed and grappled at the tarmac. Through the window now Purkiss saw the pumps rushing at him: it was too late, he was too close…

Purkiss yelled as he wrenched at the wheel with both hands, trying to drive it beyond its limits. He felt the world tilt, the tarmac tipping crazily up at him, and in a split-second he understood what was happening and let go of the wheel and braced himself for the impact.

The truck slammed on to its side in an explosion of metal and glass, the window erupting beside Purkiss’s head and showering him with granular fragments. He managed to keep his torso far enough from the door that his body avoided absorbing the full force of the collision with the tarmac, but the impact jarred him all the same, sending a bolt of agony through his shoulder and chest. He closed his eyes, waiting for the tell-tale smell of fuel followed by the sudden burst of fire which would bring the end.

*

The sudden silence made Purkiss wonder if he had, in fact, passed over into unbeing, without having realised it; but of course that made no sense. He opened his eyes.

He was cramped at an angle in the cab, his feet at the door, the rest of him diagonally across the front seat. Above him was the passenger door. He reached up, feeling the pain lance through his shoulder again, pushed the door open like a trapdoor and hauled himself out.

The truck lay on its side like a massive, slain beast, its rear doors open and its innards — children’s toys, Purkiss noticed distantly — spilled out across the forecourt. The roof of the cab had slammed against the pillar to one side of the nearest pump.

Through the shattered shop window, Berg and Kendrick stared out. Two men stood beside them, close together, their postures truculent. Cuffed, Purkiss thought.

Behind the truck, the terrible thing that had been Nakamura was difficult to discern as anything in particular.

Ramirez and Pope were gone.

Thirty-Seven

Manhattan, New York City

Tuesday 21 May, 4.15 am

The door opened and a white-faced kid peered in. Giordano thought he looked scared enough to be an intern.

‘Mr Giordano. I’m real sorry to wake you, sir — ’

‘Your job. Don’t worry about it.’ He hadn’t been asleep.

‘Mr Krugmann would like to see you, sir.’

‘Krugmann’s here?’ He blinked at his watch.

‘Sir.’

The kid led him down the corridor to another small office. Krugmann sat pouchily behind a desk. He’d sacrificed his own office for Giordano and was having to make do.

‘Though you’d be home at this hour.’

‘I’m not having you Langley boys showing me up.’ Krugmann nodded at the intern to close the door. He shoved a mug of black coffee across the desk at Giordano. ‘Just got a call. The shit’s hit the fan.’

Giordano waited.

‘Where to god damn start… Remember how the shootings of our agents up in Skylands were called in by an anonymous person calling herself a federal agent?’

‘Barbara Berg.’

Krugmann stared. ‘How the hell’d you — ? Yeah. Berg. She’s called in to her superiors here in Manhattan, saying she’s the one who called the killings in earlier, and saying she’s arrested two Company operatives on charges of attempted murder. Names of Druze and Sandford. Mean anything?’

‘No.’

‘Both based in Richmond, it seems. Anyhow, this Berg says two other Company guys were shot dead while she was making the arrests. Laymon and James. These two are from the Philadelphia office.’

Krugmann gave it to him in as ordered a fashion as could be asked for. Berg and her partner Nakamura were following a tipoff about a missing woman in Charlottesville, VA, who’d apparently fled the scene of a double homicide. They found links to the former agent Crosby and obtained further intel from him before they were attacked by a group of what turned out to be CIA men. Subsequent evidence led them to a service station outside Philadelphia where they found four men who turned out also to be CIA, laying siege to a gunman holding the missing woman Ramirez hostage. When Berg pointed out the CIA men weren’t authorised to act on domestic soil the Company men had attacked her and her partner, and attempted to storm the service station and kill both the gunman and his hostage. Berg and her partner killed tow of the CIA men and arrested a further two. The gunman escaped with his hostage and killed the partner, Nakamura, in the process.

There was no mention in the account of John Purkiss.

Krugmann pinched his eyes shut for a long moment, massaging his forehead with the fingertips of one hand. ‘It makes no god damn sense, Ray. None at all. This Berg goes rogue for a while, calling things in anonymously, running around like Rambo killing Company guys. All supposedly after being tipped off about some missing person crap hundreds of miles away. Then she comes out of the cold to say there’s a kidnapper on the loose with a hostage.’

‘What does the Director say?’ Giordano meant the FBI Director.

‘Nothing at the moment. He’s pissed off with us, and I can’t say I blame him. Whatever this agent of his, Berg, has done, she seems to have caught so far eight of our people in the commission of various felonies. If I were the Feebs I’d be looking for revenge, starting with keeping us as far out of the loop as possible.’

‘They’ll have to involve us sooner or later.’

‘Yeah. Once they’ve flushed out whatever rotten apples remain in our barrel.’ Krugmann cracked his knuckles. ‘You’ll need to get back to Langley, I believe. This doesn’t just involve New York any more.’

‘You’re right.’ Giordano stood. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my office for some privacy. I should be getting a call from the Chief at any moment.’

‘That you certainly will, my friend.’

*

Giordano slumped heavily in the office chair, his phone on the desk in front of him. It began buzzing immediately. He glanced at the number. The Chief.

He let it go to voicemail.

He did the same with a second call from the Chief. Then with one from Naomi.

Giordano stared at the wall, idly tracing a fine crack in the plaster from its source. He too had calls to make. Plenty of them. Ordinarily a decisive man, he didn’t in this case know where to start.

The phone sounded again, the vibration nearly sending it off the desk.

He didn’t recognise the number.

Giordano picked up the phone and hit the green button. He listened.

‘Raymond Giordano.’ A man’s voice. Accented, though he couldn’t tell with what.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Darius Pope. Does the surname ring any bells?’

And it all made sense, like a kaleidoscopic picture shifting into focus.

Giordano waited still. The voice — the accent was English — said, ‘Tell nobody of this conversation. Be in the Board Room annex of the Holtzmann Solar head office, in the Loomis Building in Manhattan, at ten o’clock this morning. Make sure you’re there alone.’

Giordano opened his mouth to speak, and it was as if his indrawn breath prompted the man to interrupt: ‘Just so that you’re aware of what will happen if you don’t follow my instructions to the letter.’

He paused, as if to make sure he had Giordano’s full attention.

‘I have your daughter.’

Thirty-Eight

Manhattan, New York City

Tuesday 21 May, 7.35 am

Kendrick’s footfalls echoed off the bare walls in a rhythm that started to grate on Purkiss. He was standing at the large, tall window facing eastwards, watching the red sun emerge above the distant Jersey horizon.

‘Would you stop that,’ he said.

Kendrick glared. ‘You pace.’

‘I pace. I don’t prowl.’

He could see Kendrick was getting the urge, which he usually did at this stage of an operation: the craving for chemical stimulation. Normally Purkiss looked the other way, but this time he wouldn’t. There was no question of Kendrick’s stalking the early morning New York streets, looking for a fix.

‘How long’s she been?’ said Kendrick.

‘An hour.’

Berg had dropped them back at the abandoned office they’d used earlier when they’d been in the city the previous afternoon. She’d gone on to her headquarters to meet her boss and debrief.

They had debated it feverishly on the hundred-mile journey back to the city. This time they’d taken one car, Nakamura’s Taurus. The local cops had arrived within minutes of Pope’s disappearance, and Berg had taken control, giving them a brief summary and leaving them to convert the area into a crime scene and to take the two men Berg had arrested, Druze and Laymon, into custody. She’d liaised with the local FBI office in Philadelphia and arranged for them to escort the two men back to Manhattan for questioning. Apart from their names, which the men had acknowledged when Kendrick had found their drivers’ licences on them, they’d refused to speak without legal representation. A check on their licences confirmed they were both CIA.

Purkiss and Berg both agreed that New York was Pope’s likely destination. He’d appeared to be heading there before. It was possible, of course, that he intended to travel beyond the city and further north, but they had no way of knowing this. Pope had taken one of the cars belonging to the CIA men, but although

The debate was over how much to report in and how much to withhold. Berg had been in favour of making a full disclosure, of telling her superiors everything she knew, including about Purkiss’s involvement.

‘This is too big for us,’ she said. ‘Multiple CIA agents operating illegally, a British spook running amuck, killing and kidnapping… it needs the whole Bureau behind it.’

‘They’ll sideline you,’ said Purkiss.

‘No they won’t.’

‘They certainly will. You’ll be deemed unfit to proceed further. You’ve fired your weapon multiple times, you’ve almost been killed just as often. You watched your partner being crushed to death.’

She jerked her head round angrily, making the Taurus swerve. ‘Hey. No need to rub it in.’

‘I’m just trying to make a point. I know how organisations work. Yours, mine… they’re all the same. You’ll be thanked for bringing this serious matter to the bosses’ attention, they may even pardon you for going renegade earlier. But they’ll want to take it away from you and run it themselves.’

From the back seat Kendrick said, ‘Like the bloody Army.’

Berg said, ‘What do you suggest?’

‘How much slack will your boss cut you? If you tell him you’ve got an informant, i.e. me, but can’t reveal my name without jeopardising the operation?’

She rocked her head. ‘Maybe.’

‘Then that’s the line you take. Tell him about Crosby, about Holtzmann Solar and the Caliban operation, about everything that’s happened. Tell him there’s an Englishman named Pope who’s kidnapped the Ramirez woman, though you don’t know why, which is the truth. Leave out the fact that Pope’s a British intelligence agent, that his father was one too, that Kendrick or I are involved.’

‘It’ll come out in the end.’

‘But it can’t come out now. If your Bureau learns there’s a British agent operating in a situation like this it’ll have repercussions that don’t bear thinking about. It’ll scupper our job, hinder us from finding Pope. Yes, eventually my role will become apparent, but it won’t matter so much if we’ve managed to stop Pope by then.’

She drove in silence for a full minute, her thoughts visibly churning. Then: ‘All right. I must be out of my mind.’

*

Kendrick said, ‘Should’ve worked them over.’

‘What?’ Purkiss turned from the window.

‘Those two CIA pillocks. Back at the petrol station. We should’ve made them tell us what they knew. The coppers would have been none the wiser.’

‘Berg wouldn’t have allowed it.’

‘But you agree with me. You know I’m right, Purkiss.’

Purkiss turned away again. It was clear, now, that the CIA faction, the one that included the men who’d tailed him in Hamburg as well as the ones who’d shot up Crosby’s place and now the ones from the service station, didn’t want the Ramirez woman dead. If they had, Pope wouldn’t have been able to use her as a shield the way he had; they would have simply gunned her down along with Pope. That meant Ramirez was important enough for both Pope and the CIA faction to want to keep her alive.

And yes, Kendrick was right. The men they’d captured would have been able to tell them why. It was a theoretical point now, nothing more; they were in FBI custody and would lawyer up, as the Americans put it. The truth would come out, but probably too late to be of much practical use.

Ignoring what he’d said to Kendrick, Purkiss began to pace. He ran through what he knew.

Pope was here as a result of something his father had been involved in, something that had led to his father’s death, accidentally or otherwise. An illegal drug trial.

The trial was being conducted with the active collaboration of a black ops cell within the CIA, and under its auspices.

Pope had taken a woman captive and was taking pains to keep her alive.

At the same time a CIA black ops cell was trying to retrieve her.

Ramirez was key. And not only did Purkiss not know why, he’d also let her slip through his fingers. He’d let her be taken, just as he’d let Abby be taken, the second time permanently. And Claire…

He stopped, clenched his fists so that his nails bit deep half moons into his palms, and counted backwards. When the anger had subsided he applied himself once more to the problem.

Ramirez, who’d been a child of ten or eleven at the time of the Caliban operation, was connected with it. That meant she either held crucial knowledge about the project — highly unlikely — or she had some personal connection to somebody involved in it.

He replayed what Berg had found out about her. US citizen by birth. Mother Honduran. Father unknown.

It was a huge risk — Berg’s superiors might have taken her phone and be monitoring her calls — but he took out his own phone and dialled her number. She answered immediately. ‘Yeah, Purkiss.’

‘Can you talk?’

‘On my way to you. They might tail me so I’ll have to do a few evasive moves. I’ve got a reprieve. You’re my informant and your ID’s protected for now.’

‘Great.’

‘And my balls are for the chop when this is over, or would be if I was a guy. What’s up?’

‘You bringing your laptop?’

‘Of course. Why?’

He told her.

*

‘There’s an alert out, not just for the five NYC boroughs but for all the northeastern states,’ said Berg. ‘TV stations, local and the networks. Several photos of Ramirez, though we’ve only got the one of Pope.’

She’d brought coffee in paper cups for the three of them as well as a bag of doughnuts. Her face was drawn with fatigue, but her eyes burned. They sat around the laptop at one of the desks.

‘It’s worth trying, but it’s unlikely to yield anything useful,’ Purkiss said. ‘Pope knows he’s exposed now. He’ll either go to ground, or move so quickly we won’t know what he’s got planned till it’s over.’

‘You think it’s blackmail?’

Purkiss drank coffee, felt the caffeine blaze its way through his body. ‘Of some kind, yes. Not money. If my idea’s right, that Ramirez’s unknown father is the person Pope’s after, then he’s probably using her to flush the man out.’

‘Which suggests this is a harder man to get to than the other ones, the ones Pope killed. Jablonsky and the rest.’

‘Right. Which in turn suggests it’s someone more senior. Somebody protected by a greater level of security. Perhaps based in Langley itself.’

Berg had set several searches running on Nina Ramirez. Schooling records, family contacts, even her immunisation schedule. Anything that might shed light on her paternity.

‘Her birth certificate records her father as unknown,’ said Berg. ‘She’s a US citizen because she was born here. Her mother was a Honduran national. But every time I try searching for details about the mother, I get no records found. There’s nothing about her marriage, if she ever was married, or any other kids she might have had.’

‘They’ve been cleaned,’ Purkiss said. ‘Run through the daughter’s timeline.’

Berg brought up a document. ‘Born March tenth, 1987, Richmond, Virginia. School there all the way through, with a period of disruption when she was eleven when her mom died in a car crash. There’s no death certificate on the mom, by the way. Lived with grandmother after that, as we know. Graduated high school 2005, then university at Charlottesville.’

‘The mother died in 1998.’

‘At the time Pope’s father was found dead. Yeah, I noticed that.’

Purkiss said, ‘Is there any way you can identify CIA personnel from that period? Staff stationed in overseas countries?’

Berg shook her head. ‘No. We keep tabs on Company staff here in the US, but their international data is tighter than a witch’s ass. I could ask my boss to go to the Director and make a direct appeal to the CIA, but it’ll take forever and the politics would be hard to get round.’

‘There’s a quicker way,’ said Purkiss.

*

Vale rang back after an hour, one in which the shifting shadows in the office made Purkiss acutely aware of how quickly time was passing. He’d given Vale the barest outline of events — he was in New York, Pope was possibly there too and had a hostage — because he wanted him to concentrate on the task he had for him.

‘Took a bit longer than I’d have liked,’ said Vale. ‘The records from the nineties haven’t all been fully converted to digital format yet and I had to get a couple of people to hunt down the files.’

‘And?’

‘The intel the Service has on the CIA’s Central American staff and activities from that time is patchy. It’s not like the eighties when everything was kicking off in Nicaragua and El Salvador. But I did manage to get the personnel records for Honduras — there’s really only one lot of information, for the capital, Tegucigalpa. Will email it across.’

It came through after a minute. Purkiss forwarded the file to Berg’s laptop. It was, as Vale had said, a personnel file for the CIA station in the Honduran capital for the years 1995 until 2005. There were dossiers attached for six or seven of the names.

The head of station from 1995 to 1999 was one Philip B. Mayhew. Berg opened the dossier. Two indistinct photos accompanied a short biography.

Mayhew was African American. ‘Not him,’ said Purkiss. Ramirez had appeared to be of mixed race, but lighter-skinned than would be likely if Mayhew were her father.

The deputy head for the years 1996 to 1999 was a possibility. He stared back in a single black-and-white mugshot, perhaps a passport photo. In his late forties, clean-shaven but with the shadowed cheeks of a naturally hirsute man, solidly built. His name was Raymond Giordano.

The rest on the list were lesser functionaries, field agents and support staff for the most part. Purkiss and Berg scanned through them; then Purkiss said, ‘Check the names.’

Berg entered the complete list on her database and began the search.

*

‘Some hits,’ she said. Purkiss had been stretching his arms and legs, trying to ease the pain in his shoulder, talking to Kendrick. He came over to the laptop.

‘Four of these people are based in Langley now,’ she said. ‘The boss, Mayhew, is in the Middle East.’

‘His deputy? Giordano?’

‘Langley.’ She brought up a window. ‘Deputy Director. No portfolio.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The Bureau isn’t sure, but it’s suspected the CIA has a department dedicated to investigating enemy action against its own personnel, in the US and abroad. Whatever it is, Deputy Director’s a senior position. Giordano’s one of the big boys.’

The accompanying picture was another mugshot but a more up-to-date one. Giordano had aged, put on weight, and grown a salt-and-pepper beard. With his face now partly obscured, his eyes were more distinctive. Purkiss had seen those eyes before: in the service station shop, staring at him as he tried to entice them away from Pope.

‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s Ramirez’s father.’

Thirty-Nine

Manhattan, New York City

Tuesday 21 May, 7.30 am

Pope was saying something but Nina didn’t register a word.

For the first time since lunchtime yesterday — was it really less than twenty-four hours ago that this had begun? — she craved music. Not to play it; just to hear it speak to her, to lie adrift in the river of it. Something pure, without bombast. Bach, maybe, or Beethoven’s late quartets.

She couldn’t hear any, so she clutched her violin to her as a reminder of that world.

They were on the outskirts of a park, somewhere. She didn’t think it was Central Park; it was too small for that, and she had a vague notion they were near the East River. She’d been to New York exactly three times in her life, once on a trip with her grandmother and twice to attend concerts with her group. She was fascinated and repelled by the city’s gargantuan size in equal measure, and had learned little of its geography.

Vaguely she registered mild surprise at the number of people on the streets at this hour, a time when back in Charlottesville most people would still be in bed. She was incurious about where they were going, or why they had left the car they had reached the city in (the second, or perhaps third, car since the terrible time at the gas station) and were now on foot, Pope striding at her side, gently but firmly compelling her to keep pace with him.

A homeless man strummed a guitar in a bus shelter. She slowed to listen, but before Pope could chide her along the man pulled out a cell phone to answer it and the moment was gone.

She was incurious because she knew, finally, that she could trust Pope. The doubts that had pricked at her ever since she’d met him in such violent circumstances, and that had threatened to skewer her through when he’d first held her like a human shield and then when the other man, the one who’d come in through the back and had also sounded English, had enticed her away from Pope… these were gone like flute notes in the wind. Pope hadn’t let her down yet. He’d told Nina terrible things, things that most other people would have kept hidden from her… had kept hidden from her since she was a child. Things she’d suspected to be true. And despite the things she’d seen him do, which previously would have convinced her of a man’s wickedness, she knew he was, at heart, good. Good in a way nobody she’d ever met before was good, apart from her mother and grandmother. And even they’d concealed things from her, as she had now discovered.

The clincher, the thing that finally convinced her of Pope’s honesty, was hearing her father’s voice. Pope had been driving them through some darkened town, in Jersey, she guessed, and had pulled over beside an old-fashioned call box. He’d indicated to her to climb out with him and she’d obeyed, then crowded close at his signal so that she could hear the voice on the other end of the line. Even after fifteen years there was no mistaking the gruff warmth, the weight of what she’d always thought of as kindness behind the tones.

She didn’t say anything, half-expecting Pope to make her speak in order to convince her father that she was really there. But it was as if her father believed Pope, implicitly. When Pope said I have your daughter he winked at her, drawing the sting from the menace of the words.

She’d never been able to find her father. Her grandmother had discouraged her from trying to make contact with him, and the tentative attempts she’d made as an adult to find out even where he was living had come to nothing. Yet Pope, in her life for less than twelve hours, had not only located her father but had allowed her to hear his voice.

Somebody who could do that for her was to be trusted.

*

Abruptly Pope led her off the street and into the darkness of a covered public parking lot. Their footsteps echoed in the sudden cavernous space. Pope stopped at a light truck, grey in the gloom. He fished out a set of keys and unlocked the passenger door.

‘Our new wheels, for the moment.’

Nina climbed in, propping the violin case at her feet as she’d done in the last three or four or however many cars it was they’d used. This was, she noticed, the first one Pope had keys for other than the one he’d taken from the gas station. He was round the back of the van, working the doors there. Nina stared straight ahead. In a minute he climbed in beside her.

The truck lumbered under the raised boom, feeling to Nina as if it was struggling to move under a heavy load.

*

They crawled through the canyons of the city, low orange morning sunlight splashing them in bursts before retreating again behind the bristling towers. How could anybody live here, she wondered. Loomed over at every turn. Landmarks she recognised came and went: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Grand Central Station.

Pope navigated easily, deftly turning aside from congested streets down side routes, always giving the impression of driving with purpose. He turned right down a ramp that led to another boom, where he took a ticket from the dispenser. They rolled into another car park, this one subterranean beneath a tower whose peak was higher than Nina could imagine.

The parking lot was around half full. Pope drove slowly between the columns, turning his head this way and that, occasionally dabbing the brake as if considering a bay, then moving on. Eventually he swung into one between two smaller cars and cut the engine.

She waited until he’d helped her down, then walked alongside him past the barrier and back up the ramp into the light. Once more she twisted to look up at the building. Some kind of office skyscraper.

‘Are we going to meet my father?’ She hadn’t intended to say the words; they’d been plucked from her involuntarily.

‘Yes,’ said Pope. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

Forty

6.40 am

Giordano slipped the photo of Adrienne from his wallet and looked at it. It was a couple of years old, had been taken on one of their rare vacations together at Cape Cod. He loved it because it captured her perfectly: the cheeriness of her eyes, the knowingness of her smile.

The trouble is, he thought, you don’t know.

He grasped the picture in his fist, pressed it against his forehead like a totem.

Giordano had jettisoned his Catholic faith like a cast-off flak jacket in his twenties. He hadn’t embraced any of the trippy alternative religions that had been so much in vogue at that time, in the early seventies; he’d been too busy blazing his way up the Company ranks, a hotshot new kid who was being tipped for big things one day. But he wondered now about karma.

He’d always known today was coming. He just couldn’t be sure what form it would take.

*

He wandered the corridors to the elevator. Krugmann emerged from his temporary office behind him.

‘You off?’

‘Yeah. Thanks,’ said Giordano, without turning round.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Krugmann said sourly.

When he’d been in Manhattan on previous occasions and had needed to think, and when the weather was fine, Giordano had walked complete circuits of the perimeter of Central Park, and it was there he headed out of habit. But there really wasn’t anything to think about. There was no plotting to be done, no strategy to work out in his head.

He would no more organise back up, or inform anybody of his movements, or have a GPS trace put on his cell phone, than he would ignore Pope’s summons. He would be at the appointed place, in the Board Room annex of the Holtzmann Solar offices, at the appointed time of ten o’clock, which was three hours from now. Access to the office would be simple; God knew he was regarded as a figure of authority there, even though he hadn’t been near the place for more than a decade.

He would meet Pope there, and he’d see in the young man’s face the ghost of his father. Giordano recalled, clear as light, the moment Taylor had presented him with evidence of Geoffrey Pope’s true identity. Taylor had voiced his suspicions weeks earlier but Giordano hadn’t wanted to believe. The man he knew as Rickman, the British former intelligence operative who could secure financial backing for the worldwide manufacturing and distribution of the drug from the Caliban project, was still an active SIS agent. They’d been penetrated, compromised, and it was through Giordano’s weakness; because Giordano had liked the man.

He hadn’t been Giordano to Rickman, any more than Rickman had been Pope to him. Instead, he’d been Zaccardo, or just Z. But at the end, when Giordano had watched three of his men hold Rickman — Pope — down while a fourth jammed the needle in, Pope had whispered his name — Giordano — while staring into his eyes with a look almost of triumph.

As if the man had known today would arrive, like an arm clawing out of the past.

Yes, Giordano thought as he made his way up Eighth Avenue, he’d meet Pope at the appointed place, and Pope would kill him. But first, Pope would do something to his daughter. To Nina. And that was what Giordano had to prevent, if it was the last thing he did. Which it certainly would be.

*

Had he loved her?

He was using the walk around the periphery of the park not to plan, but to review, as if the meaning of a decade and a half — a lifetime, really — could be crystallised in the space of an hour’s stroll.

Giordano had met Carmen Ramirez in 1986, at Langley. He was by then vying for the Central America desk. The Iran-Contra scandal was coming to the boil — the lid would blow off that November — and it was widely expected that heads would roll and new blood would be needed. Giordano was well respected and a strong candidate for the post, but he was up against somebody who had an edge over him, someone marginally more senior and more of an ass kisser.

Carmen was a probationer of twenty-five, a year out of college and at an entry-level accounting job in the Company. She was bright, she had a sharp eye for financial irregularities, and she was beautiful. It started as a fling. Giordano was ten years older than her and acutely aware of the need not to be seen as abusing his authority over her.

She fell pregnant, and Giordano made his decision. They were married in the fall. Giordano now had a direct connection with Latin America, and a reason to visit Honduras regularly to see Carmen’s family. Over the following year, through Nina’s birth and beyond, he developed an intimate familiarity with the country, learning to speak the local dialect fluently.

It swung it for him. The new broom of 1987 swept out the dead wood and propelled Giordano to the job he wanted. He’d made it his own, pulling off some spectacular successes — the groundwork for the Noriega ousting in Panama in 1989 was his doing, as was the bringing about of the elections in Nicaragua the following year.

And then, in the next half-decade, came the increasingly intimate contact with Holtzmann Solar and Giordano’s growing interest in what one of their prototype compounds promised. In Honduras, the notorious Battalion 316, the death squad that had operated in the eighties, had been disbanded but many of its personnel remained, and it was through these men that Giordano was able to procure both impoverished volunteers for the Caliban project and somewhat less voluntary subjects.

In 1997 Giordano took the job as Company station chief for Honduras. It was a step down, career-wise, but Giordano assured the Director that it was for a limited time only, maximum two years, and would allow him to build richer networks in the region than he’d otherwise manage. And so Giordano, Carmen, who’d by that time left the Company, and little Nina relocated to Tegucigalpa.

Giordano had moved his family to the island off the coast when the trials had begun in 1998. He was spending increasing amounts of time on the island, and felt Carmen and Nina would be safer there with him rather than on the mainland. Accordingly, he’d arranged for Nina to take six months out of school, to be made up for by private tutoring when they returned. Carmen was furious. Carmen was also by then well aware that Giordano’s activities had crossed the line into illegality, and her guilt at her complicity paralysed her, prevented her from defying him.

Yet, in the end, she had defied him. As the hurricane approached the island that fateful October, her hysteria had spilled over into concrete threats. She would take Nina and flee, go straight to the Director and to the FBI and the New York Times and tell them everything. Giordano had never been an impulsive man, and he’d taken the decision to silence her in his usual measured way. He hadn’t done the act himself, had left it to Jablonsky and Taylor.

Giordano had been coming down Museum Mile on the park’s east side, but found that he’d wandered a couple of blocks away, to Park Avenue. Before him loomed the Church of St Ignatius Loyola. He stared up at the crucified figure.

He felt nothing. No yearning for absolution, no stirrings of conscience. The guilt was a gnarled and twisted thing inside him, like an alcoholic’s cirrhotic, dead liver.

Ten to eight. A little over two hours until he met his destiny.

Forty-One

9.20 am

‘He’s not there,’ said Berg.

Purkiss turned. He’d been staring off through the window to the west because gazing at the walls only added to his sense of frustrated crampedness. ‘They say where he is?’

‘No. But they wouldn’t, would they.’ She dropped the phone on the desk.

Berg had rung Langley, identified herself as FBI and asked to speak to Raymond Giordano. She’d made it through to a secretary.

‘You couldn’t get his cell phone number, by any chance?’

Berg: ‘They’d never give it out to someone of my rank.’

‘What about a tap on it?’

‘Even harder. Besides, it’d take a couple of hours at least to find a judge with the cojones to authorise it.’

Purkiss knuckled his forehead. They had no direct access to Pope. But there was a possibility, a strong one, that he’d either been in contact with Giordano or knew his whereabouts and was closing in on him. Giordano was their route to Pope, but they couldn’t find him either.

Perhaps he was wrong to focus on Giordano. Perhaps there was a way of anticipating Pope’s movements. In his mind Purkiss replayed everything he’d learned about Pope over the last few hours. He rewound it and replayed it again. Rewound and replayed.

‘Douglas Torrance.’

‘What?’

‘The name on the British driver’s licence Pope used to rent the car in Charlottesville. Run a check on it.’

‘He won’t still be using that now,’ said Berg.

‘I know. But he might have used it before.’

*

‘Yeah. Here we are.’

She jabbed a finger at the monitor.

‘When he arrived here at JFK on Sunday night, he used ID with the name Brian Sopwith. That doesn’t come up again. But he used a passport with the Douglas Torrance ID to enter the US, also via JFK, on April fifth this year. Departed April fourteenth. And before that, through Washington D.C., from January twelfth till February first.’

‘What?’ Purkiss frowned at the screen. ‘He’s been here twice already this year?’

‘Looks like it.’

It was intelligence he should have unearthed earlier, and now there was almost too much to process. ‘Can you dig deeper? Find out if he rented any cars, did anything else that left a paper trail?’

‘Sure.’ Her fingers sped over the keys.

Ten minutes later she said, ‘Yep. This is a good one. DMV says he took ownership of a light truck on April eighth. That’s three days after he arrived in the country on his last visit..’

‘A light truck.’

‘Yeah. This make.’ She brought up some images. It looked like a large transit van. ‘Not typically for recreational use. The kind of thing you’d get if you wanted to transport something.’

‘Any other mention of this particular vehicle?’

‘No. It hasn’t come up since. No accidents, no mentions that it’s been found abandoned or anything.’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘Does it say where he bought the vehicle?’

‘Yes. A used car dealership in Poughkeepsie. That’s upstate.’

‘Can you call them? See how he paid?’

‘Ah. I see what you’re getting at.’ Berg picked up her phone.

It took several calls: the first to establish that nobody was in the dealer’s office yet, subsequent ones to discover the identity of the proprietor and get him at home. He took the time to check Berg’s credentials with her office, and she was relieved when her boss vouched for her. Then the man had to get to his office. He rang back in twenty minutes.

Purkiss heard the dealer’s side of the conversation over the phone’s speaker. Pope had paid with a credit card, also in the name of Douglas Torrance. It was a risk, using the same ID multiple times, but Purkiss supposed somebody who was obviously foreign like Pope would be required to provide several different forms of identification when doing something like purchasing a car.

Berg rang the credit card company, had to go through an even more rigorous process of checking and transfers from one personnel member to another, and was eventually granted access. Purkiss looked at his watch. Eight forty.

‘Holy — Look at this.’

Berg’s tone made even Kendrick wander over.

She said: ‘During his last visit, on April sixth, Torrance AKA Pope laid down two months’ rent in advance on his credit card.’

‘Rent for what?’ said Purkiss.

‘An apartment in Manhattan.’ She brought up a detailed street map. ‘Here. In Midtown East.’

Purkiss and Kendrick watched as she zoomed the view in. ‘This block.’

‘What’s that next to it?’ Purkiss asked. Berg called up Google Earth, entered the address and swung the view to street level.

The apartment block looked fifteen or twenty stories high, but was dwarfed by a broad-based, soaring building beside it.

‘The Loomis Building,’ said Berg.

‘What’s that?’

‘Offices, I believe,’ she said. She typed the name in to Google and a list came up.

‘My God,’ said Purkiss.

Occupying all thirty-four floors of the Loomis Building were the offices of Holtzmann Solar.

*

Purkiss took the stairs three at a time, Berg and Kendrick jostling behind him. The crosstown journey could take any time at all, Berg said, given that it was morning rush hour.

She was still driving Nakamura’s Taurus and had parked on a yellow line up on the kerb. She had the engine running before Purkiss had strapped himself in.

In the small of his back, Purkiss felt the pressure of the Glock, now reloaded.

Berg put a flasher on the roof and turned on the sound. The Taurus howled through the streets heading eastwards.

‘Just in the beginning, to clear the path,’ she said.

Even so, the traffic threatened to snarl them and she had to detour south and loop round. Purkiss slowed his breathing, concentrated on feeling his heart beat steadily rather than gallop. He needed to be at the peak of the adrenaline curve later, when it mattered, not now.

They were crossing Broadway, Purkiss recognised, when two sirening marked police cars cut across them, heading in the same direction.

‘Shit,’ said Berg. ‘I forgot this.’ She turned on the radio.

It immediately squawked into life, voices criss-crossing and initially unintelligible over the static.

All units to First. Repeat, all units…. First. Loomis Building….evacuation……

Forty-Two

9.40 am

Pope heard the sirens distantly and saw that Nina had, too. The triple glazing of the windows muffled the sound remarkably. The glass, the space, the location… all contributed to the colossal price tag of the apartment’s rent. But that didn’t matter; it was a one-off payment, three months’ rent in advance, and it had bought him the location he wanted.

He and Nina sat in the middle of the expanse of the living room, among the modernist-spartan pieces of furniture. The heavy drapes were drawn across the wall-length windows that opened on to the balcony, and they would stay drawn for the time being.

The alarm sounded outside in the corridor, mirroring the klaxons that were going off on every one of the building’s other twenty-one floors.

Despite himself Pope was interested in the logistics of the evacuation. Would the police or the fire department do a door-to-door search of the building, ensuring everybody had vacated the apartments? Or would they rely on a head count, measured against the doorman’s record of who had signed in to the apartment block, and concentrate their efforts on clearing everyone out of the Loomis building? Even if they did come knocking door to door, they’d hardly expect anyone to be actively hiding in any of the apartments. Pope and Nina were in no danger of being discovered.

The response had been quick, he had to admit. They’d taken the service lift from the basement, just as he had done before entering Grosvenor’s flat when he’d first arrived in the city this time, and had reached the nineteenth-storey apartment without encountering another soul. Pope had sat Nina down on the sofa, a singularly uncomfortable-looking piece of furniture just like the rest, and had stood while he made the call.

He’d seen Nina’s eyes widen perceptibly as she’d listened.

‘There’s a bomb in the Loomis Building, Park Avenue,’ he said, once the 911 dispatcher had put him through to the police. ‘I’m going to set it off within the next hour. It’s going to bring down the entire building. I suggest you take the necessary steps to avoid substantial loss of life.’

And that was the extent of it. The sirens stared up within ten minutes. He’d — briefly — wondered if he’d be treated as a hoaxer. Perhaps before that day in the autumn of 2001 he would have been.

*

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

He sat opposite her on another uncomfortable chair, leaned forward.

She raised her head. Her eyes were calm but questioning.

‘You’re letting them get all those people out.’

‘Because they don’t all deserve to die. Some of them do, but it’s impossible to separate them out. So they have to live, to avoid killing innocents.’

Pope regarded himself as honest, at least with himself. such honesty made him acknowledge inwardly that his explanation was only partially satisfactory. Yes, large-scale loss of life would be tragic, and unjustified, morally. But there was another reason he wanted everybody cleared out of the building. Almost everybody.

It meant he’d have uninterrupted time to talk to Z.

After the call to the police, after he’d shut the switchboard woman off in mid-question, he’d dialled again. It was answered even more quickly than the 911 call.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you in the building?’

‘Yes. I’m in the elevator.’ Giordano — Z — sounded out of breath. ‘Heading up to the boardroom annex now. Where — ’

‘They’re going to start evacuating the building very soon,’ said Pope. ‘Under no circumstances allow yourself to be removed. You understand why, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I understand.’

‘Hide if you have to. But be unobtrusive. And be there at ten o’clock.’

Pope rang off.

He walked over to the drapes and peered through the crack, in case Giordano was already there, in the specified room. But there was no movement at the glass.

The clatter of helicopters had started up, and in the distant sky Pope saw them converging like bees.

*

He’d laid the groundwork over the last ten years. The practical details of the plan had been set up in the last four months.

Once Pope had obtained the names and whereabouts of the four of them — Jablonsky, Taylor, Grosvenor and of course Giordano himself — it had been a matter of working out a schedule, one that would allow him to follow a path that would take out the first three as economically and yet as visibly as possible while keeping up enough momentum to prevent Giordano from stopping him. That path had begun in Amsterdam, almost been scuppered by Purkiss before leading to New York, and then via Charlottesville back to Manhattan.

Pope realised quickly, once he tracked Giordano down and discovered his senior position at Langley, that he’d never reach the man directly. His home was similarly next to impossible to find: its location was such a cleverly concealed secret that Pope had marvelled when his repeated attempts had failed to find it. So, Giordano would have to be got at by another route. Pope based his strategy on a gamble: he believed, from his repeated analysis of his father’s diary notes, that Giordano had strong feelings for the daughter he’d abandoned, and that she would provide a point of access.

What Pope hadn’t bargained on — and it was a mistake, he admitted to himself — was that Giordano would have Nina under constant surveillance. That detail had, like Purkiss’s intervention in Amsterdam, nearly derailed the plan. Pope’s first visit to the United States in January had established Ramirez’s whereabouts, her working patterns, but it had failed to appreciate the fact that she had watchers constantly. Pope considered himself lucky that the watchers hadn’t spotted him at that early stage.

He’d used the January trip to obtain — with moderate difficulty — Giordano’s cell phone number. He had done this through that most ancient of the spy’s tactics, namely the honey trap. One of Giordano’s aides, an up-and-coming junior staffer named Naomi Johnson, had proved hard to pin down but less difficult to win over. He hadn’t discussed politics or work or anything with her; had simply obtained her own cell phone by sleight of hand at an opportune moment and found the required number listed as RAG, Giordano’s initials.

Pope’s second visit to the US, the April trip, had been concerned with the practicalities of the final stage in his operation. He’d obtained a staff member’s ID pass to the Holtzmann Solar offices in the Loomis building and had committed to memory the details before returning it to the unsuspecting staffer. Those details he later used back in his SIS base in Amsterdam to produce a forged pass. Also while in the US on the second trip, he’d rented the apartment across from the Loomis building. The floor plan of the Holtzmann Solar headquarters wasn’t that hard to come by, and he’d identified the room directly across from his apartment, namely the Board Room Annex.

A journey upstate had obtained for Pope the light truck, and some shopping around had procured the necessary materials for the bomb: a urea nitrate main charge with nitroglycerine as a booster explosive and several tanks of bottled hydrogen to enhance the effect of the blast. The entire bomb weighed just under a tonne. He’d left the truck in the public car lot near Gramercy Park and made sure he’d paid enough to last until his return this time.

And here he was, in the end phase. He was at the vantage point he’d decided on, with the woman, Giordano’s daughter, at his side, waiting for Giordano to make an appearance in the adjacent building.

He’d made it. Somewhere, Pope believed, his father had taken note.

Forty-Three

9.45 am

The gridlock had shut down on the streets as suddenly as a trap springing shut.

Berg punched buttons on the radio, trying to get a clearer signal. Eventually one broke through.

…Credible threat of a bomb in the Loomis Building. Evacuation of the building and the surrounding blocks underway. All units to regard as a priority.

‘Car bomb,’ said Purkiss. ‘The light truck Pope rented. It’ll be in the basement.’

‘Yeah,’ said Berg. ‘Jesus.’ She picked up her phone, dialled, spoke rapidly and concisely, then rang off. ‘At least now they know what to look for.’

Through the windscreen Purkiss watched people stepping out on to the streets, gazing off in the direction the police vehicles appeared to be heading, disregarding the traffic which wasn’t moving anyway.

‘Out,’ said Purkiss.

Berg hesitated, then climbed out to join Purkiss and Kendrick. The road was blocked as far ahead as they could see. The crowds on the streets and the pavements were catching the mood already, becoming a herd united in rising wonder and panic.

‘Lead the way,’ said Purkiss.

They moved rapidly, weaving their way through the throng, the three of them abreast. Berg said, ‘I’m trying to figure this… Pope’s in the building? Going to take it down, him and the Ramirez woman included?’

‘Possibly,’ said Purkiss.

‘You’re not convinced?’

‘I don’t know.’ They were, Purkiss guessed, a few blocks from their destination. Uniformed police were corralling the crowds away and deploying tape and barriers across the streets. ‘There’s a loose end. And that loose end’s Giordano.’

‘How so?’

‘Pope wants revenge on Giordano and he’s going to kill his daughter to achieve that. I think we can assume that’s correct. But is he really going to stop there? Is Giordano’s daughter’s death really punishment enough? Look at the vengeance Pope’s exacting on Holtzmann Solar. Bringing their entire headquarters down, literally. It doesn’t make sense that he’d allow Giordano to escape relatively unscathed.’

‘You think Giordano’s in the building with him?’

‘I think he might be.’

Berg took out her phone and punched buttons as they strode.

‘Yeah. I need to know if a Raymond Giordano is on record as having entered the Loomis Building in the last twenty-four hours. Yes, I know it’s being evacuated.’

She pressed the phone against her ear and covered the other one. In a moment she said, ‘Okay. Thanks.’ She looked at Purkiss. ‘He was signed in at nine fifteen. Twenty minutes ago.’

*

The Loomis Building looked a new construction to Purkiss, a soaring blue-and-silver tower with a wedding-cake base and a sharp narrowing to a long, spire-like neck. The stream of people emerging from the front was just on the right side of becoming an uncontrollable torrent. Purkiss couldn’t remember having seen so many police officers in one place before.

To the left of the building stood a more uniformly slender apartment block, the one in which Pope had rented a property. Its entrance too was spilling bodies. Helicopters were chattering overhead, spiralling like slow moths around a flame. On the ground the inevitable television crews were trying to tunnel their way in.

The police line was ebbing outwards, forcing the crowds ever further back, and Purkiss and the other two were forced along with the masses. Purkiss struggled to keep his footing while hanging on to the thought that was tugging for his attention.

The apartment Pope rented. Why in this particular building? It had the advantage of proximity, so that Pope would have had a convenient base from which to set up the bomb plot… but why not take one even a few streets away?

And then he had it.

*

Purkiss spotted Berg a few heads away, Kendrick even further. He called across to Berg and she pushed her way through the jostling bodies until she reached him.

In her ear, over the noise, he shouted: ‘How would one get back into the building?’

She frowned as though she’d misheard. ‘Back in? No chance. There’ll be a cordon all around that you’d never cross. It’d have to be with the bomb squad, if anything.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyhow, are you nuts? Why’d you want to get in there? It’s a thirty-floor building.You’d never find Pope and the girl in time.’

‘I’m not going in there,’ Purkiss yelled back. ‘You and Kendrick are.’

Forty-Four

9.30 am

Giordano was aware of a strange peace, as though he was in an impenetrable capsule cocooned from a world that was coming to an end around him.

After Pope’s call he’d stepped out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened, even though it wasn’t the floor he wanted. The bustle in the corridors was that of a normal working day in the headquarters of a global company, not the barely contained hysteria of crowds seeking an exit. He had time to hide.

He found that old standby, a restroom, shut himself in one of the cubicles and sat on the lid of the toilet with his feet propped up so that they weren’t visible under the door.

Ten minutes later the first alarm sounded.

*

He gave it half an hour, as long as he dared while still leaving time for possible delays up to the eighteenth floor, and at nine forty-eight found himself in the plush, airconditioned surroundings of the Board Room Annex. Some annex, he thought. It was twice the size of the most of the boardrooms he’d been in.

Faintly, as if through many fathoms of water, he heard a cacophony. The glazing on the windows all but shut out the sound.

Giordano kept away from the window and sat in one of the seats around the enormous conference table, alone, to wait.

*

His guilt about Nina was cold and twisted and fossilised, but his betrayal of Naomi was raw as a wound in his conscience. She’d watched his back, had bent and even broken the rules for him on more than one occasion. Yes, she was ambitious, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt her career prospects to have a mentor of his seniority and reputation (though how that was going change now, he thought with bitter mirth). But her loyalty was based on more than just political calculation.

He’d played her, and his lesser assistant Kenny, with finely honed skill. Giordano’s people in Amsterdam had removed the CCTV cameras from outside Jablonsky’s and Taylor’s apartments and sent the footage electronically straight to Giordano. The footage wasn’t continuous — Giordano hadn’t thought it worthwhile having continuous twenty-four-hour surveillance on his former partners — but rather in a series of bursts of film. The man entering Jablonsky’s apartment was the one Giordano soon identified as John Purkiss.

Giordano assumed back then that Purkiss was the killer, so he’d kept the footage from Naomi, pretending it had been removed, and had sent those two idiots, Campbell and Barker, to monitor the arrivals at JFK Airport. He was correct in assuming that Purkiss would arrive there, but wrong in thinking he planned to kill Grosvenor, whose murder occurred before Purkiss set foot in the US. Campbell and Barker, the idiots, had bungled Purkiss’s capture. If they hadn’t done that, Purkiss would have been in Giordano’s hands now for over eighteen hours and would have given up Pope’s name. Pope might have been taken down by now.

As for Nina… the watchers Giordano had put in place for her, Druze and Laymon and the rest, might have taken her into protective custody if Giordano hadn’t told them to hang back at first, keeping close to her but seeing if they could spot if she was being followed by somebody else. That was Giordano’s mistake and nobody else’s. If he’d let them take Nina immediately instead of trying to use her as bait to flush out Pope, she’d be safe now, and Pope would have no leverage.

If, if, if. If he could change the past, Giordano would go even further back. Of course he would. Now, though, he needed to focus on making decisions that would minimise the damage that was going to be done. He’d already phoned Naomi, apologising for his delay in replying to her calls earlier and saying he was on his way back to Langley. This was to head off any move she might make to put a trace on his phone, worried as she no doubt was about his failure to respond. He didn’t need her discovering he was in this particular building. She might send someone in to get him, and that would interfere with whatever plan Pope had and thereby jeopardise Nina’s safety.

He was going to die, Giordano knew. He had no way of avoiding this, but it didn’t matter. What mattered to him was that Nina not suffer. He had nothing with which to bargain with Pope, no hands to play. If Pope had wanted a simple swap, Giordano for Nina, he would have gone along with it without hesitation. But that clearly wasn’t what Pope had in mind. He wanted Giordano to suffer, and deep in Giordano’s mind, hidden yet present like a walled-up body, was the dreadful suspicion of what Pope intended to do.

Nine fifty-five. Five minutes.

Giordano placed his phone on the table before him, and watched it.

Forty-Five

9.50 am

In his career Purkiss had broken into more places than he remembered, both as an SIS agent and in recent years in his new role. He’d learned the correct techniques for picking old-fashioned mortice locks, had become practised in the art of using a credit-card or similar strip of plastic to crack a Yale; he’d also mastered the subtler skills of deception to gain entry into places he wasn’t welcome.

This time he went for brute force.

The pathway directly behind the building gave on to manicured gardens. A concrete sculpture in the form of a Greek god, some three feet high, adorned the edge of a pond. The garden was unoccupied. Purkiss had shoved his way forward into the milling throng at the front of the building, holding his passport aloft like a staff ID card of some kind and pretending he was helping to herd the occupants of the building away from the doors. He’d edged close rot the corner and, when he was as certain as he might be that nobody was looking directly at him, or at least registering what they were seeing, he slipped round it.

The statuette was freestanding. He lifted and hefted it, then advanced to the nearest window. The ground floor of the block seemed to be like that of a hotel, without apartments but instead taken up with offices and residents’ facilities such as the gym he could see beyond the window.

Purkiss swung the base of the statuette against the window, wielding the object like a hammer rather than like a battering ram. The glass first chipped, then starred, then bulged spongily inwards. He knocked the webbed hole until it was large enough to fit him; then he threw the statue aside and climbed in.

Another noise had started up — a burglar alarm, he assumed — but it was drowned by the steady two-tone note of the fire alarm.

Purkiss ran through the gym into the corridor beyond, turning once and then again and finding himself at a bank of lifts. Pope’s apartment was number 1926, on the nineteenth floor.

He mounted the fire stairs, prepared all the time to encounter somebody coming down but meeting no-one. He supposed many if not most of the people who lived here were wealthy professionals who were out at work.

His phone rang and he slipped it out as he ascended.

It was Berg: ‘We’re in. You?’

‘Yes. Any trouble?’

‘Just a little. I told the cops we were involved in a hostage situation but they had to shut up about it. Then we just ran and got in past the bomb guys. The cops are too busy with crowd control to come after us.’

‘Good.’ He reached a landing and said, ‘I’m on the sixth floor. Fifteen to go.’

‘But the apartment’s on the nineteenth storey.’

‘I’m going two up, directly overhead. One up and he might hear me through the ceiling. Head up to as near as you can get to straight opposite his apartment. The eighteenth to twentieth floor, probably.’

‘Got you.’

*

Purkiss reached the twenty-first floor and paused on the landing, catching his breath. A full-length window gave on to a spectacular view of the skyline. When he felt ready he moved down the passage from door to door, reaching number 2126.

The locks, four of them, took him five minutes. He fumbled at the last one and forced himself to slow down. Beyond, a plush furnished apartment showed signs of having been recently abandoned: magazines were in disarray on the floor and two half-full coffee mugs stood on the table.

At the far end of the living room was a set of glass doors opening on to a balcony. Beyond, he could see the Loomis Building stretching upwards. He unlocked the doors and peered out, the sudden air chill on his face. A helicopter swung past and he ducked back inside.

‘I’m in the apartment two floors up,’ he said into his phone. ‘I’m coming out for a moment.’

When he was confident no choppers were coming he stepped on to the balcony, scanning the building opposite and seeing nothing in any of the windows, before going back in again.

Berg said, ‘Yeah, I saw you. We’re around four flights down, diagonally across to your right.’

‘Stay out of sight,’ said Purkiss. ‘The moment you see anything in Pope’s window let me know.’

He hung back beside the drapes and waited.

*

Berg’s voice was low, but excited so that it sounded like a shout: ‘He’s there. Coming out on the balcony. He’s got Ramirez with him. He’s talking on the phone.’

Purkiss opened the doors of his own balcony once more and emerged, crouching behind the wall. He peered across at the sheer steel-and-glass face of the Loomis building, letting his eyes rove across it, allowing the sensors in the periphery of his vision to detect any movement rather than seeking it out actively.

There. Below him but in a straight line opposite. Two, perhaps three floors down.

A hand pressed against the glass. A bearded face.

‘Berg,’ he said. ‘It’s Giordano.’

Purkiss made his move.

Forty-Six

10.00 am

‘Am I going to die?’

She hadn’t moved from her place on the sofa, while Pope had stood, paced, stretched. Normally quite able to keep still for long periods, he was allowing himself the luxury of impatience.

He came back and sat in front of her again.

‘I don’t know.’

It was the truth. The Loomis Building might do what the Twin Towers had done and collapse vertically downwards. Or, it might topple sideways. The bomb he’d constructed was based on the one that had been used in the original terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in February 1993, when the intention had been to drive the North Tower into its southern neighbour. If that happened, if the Loomis Building hit the apartment block, then yes, both Nina and Pope would die.

It was the luck of the draw. Life was like that. Apart from certain insignificant aspects that were under willed control, most of human existence was governed by randomness.

Nina nodded, as though it was the answer she’d been expecting.

Pope checked his watch. Ten o’clock. Still seated, he dialled Giordano’s number.

‘Yes.’

‘Come over to the window.’ Pope didn’t ask if the man was where he’d told him to be; he took that as a given.

Keeping the phone to his ear, Pope rose and motioned Nina to come with him. She picked up her violin case and followed. Pope drew the drapes, opened the doors and stepped out, pulling her gently along.

He saw, across the gap that yawned between the buildings, Giordano appear at the window, slightly below him, squinting up against the sun.

*

‘Do you understand what’s happening?’

Giordano said, ‘I don’t know precisely what you’ve got planned. I believe I can guess.’

‘Do you understand why it’s happening?’

‘Yes.’

‘You kidnapped and forcibly experimented on people.’

‘Yes.’

‘You killed to protect your secret.’

‘Yes.’

‘You murdered my father, and her mother.’

A beat. Then: ‘Yes.’

Pope reached into his pocket. He said, ‘Can you see what I’m holding?’

There was another pause. The sun glinted off the window and he could no longer see Giordano.

‘Not really.’

‘It’s another phone. When I press the dial button, it will trigger the charge in a bomb in the basement of the building you’re in. You’re going to die, along with that organisation that sponsored you. You won’t know if Nina is going to die as well. I don’t know that.’

‘Why — ’

‘You gambled with people’s lives, Giordano. Now it’s my turn to gamble. But you’ll never know the outcome.’

Silence again. Giordano said: ‘May I speak with her?’

Pope looked down at Nina. She was close enough that she would have heard her father. She nodded. He held the phone to her ear, ducking his head so that it was close.

She said, ‘D — ’ and stopped. Pope thought: she doesn’t know what to call him. Daddy, dad, father. It’s been so long.

He heard Giordano’s voice, scratchy at a distance. ‘Nina. How are you?’

For a moment Pope thought she was going to giggle at the banality of it. She opened her lips to speak, closed them again.

‘I have no right to say this. No right to give you any advice whatsoever. But you have to be strong. Like you have been, just for a little longer. And remember that I love you.’

Pope watched her stare across the divide between the two buildings.

‘Nina, I don’t expect or deserve to hear you say anything in reply. But perhaps you’ll listen. You need to take a step back and consider all of this. Everything that’s happened. Do you understand? Just take a step back.’

Pope caught something in the words, something not quite right. He glanced across, saw movement behind the glinting window. Straightening, he took the phone back.

‘Giordano.’

The man didn’t reply.

Pope heard the echo of his last words.

Take a step back.

In the instant it took him to grasp the meaning — it was not a vague piece of advice but a literal warning — Pope felt the rush of air and the blow to his head.

Forty-Seven

10.00 am

A hands-free earpiece would have allowed Berg to guide Purkiss in real time, but on the other hand it would have been a distraction. So he said, simply, ‘I’m going down,’ and rang off.

The balcony ended in a low wall, reaching up to Purkiss’s knees, which was topped by glass panels surmounted by a horizontal steel rail at chest height. Purkiss stowed the phone in his pocket and gripped the rail and swung himself over. For a heart-stopping moment he was suspended over the chasm below, and although his instinct told him not to look down, he needed something to aim at. Twisting himself so that his front was against the balcony wall, he felt his feet probe the air above the balcony on the floor below.

By flexing his hips he developed a forward-and-backward swinging motion. On the forward movement he lunged forward with his legs and let go of the railing. He dropped on to the balcony below and for a moment thought he’d misjudged it, that his head was going to hit the railing. But he landed, half on his backside, crouching, jarred by the impact.

The sky was filled with noise — helicopter rotors, sirens, shouting — and although he’d landed with a thump, he didn’t think it would have been audible on the balcony below. Nonetheless he paused for a few seconds, holding his breath, listening. Distantly he heard a low voice, a man’s. Pope’s? He couldn’t be certain.

He took out his phone and typed a rapid text message to Berg: I’m on the balcony above Pope now. I’m standing up so you can see me. Is he directly below?

The reply came back in an instant. A couple of steps to your right.

It would be harder, this drop. He didn’t have the luxury of dangling his legs over the balcony below and developing the swinging movement to gain the momentum necessary to land him on the right side of the railing. He was going to have to do it in a single action.

Purkiss closed his eyes, drew a long breath, and vaulted the railing, turning like a gymnast and jacknifing downwards.

*

This time the landing was awkward. He felt one flailing foot connect with something yielding — Pope’s head — and the other strike the railing so that his leg was bent backwards. Purkiss flung himself forward and hit the stone floor of the balcony, his outstretched arms absorbing most of the force.

Pope had reeled back but was already reacting, lashing out with a kick that missed but made Purkiss scramble towards the glass doors, unable yet to regain his footing. The woman, Ramirez, had backed against the railing, hand to her mouth.

Pope came on fast, lunging at Purkiss and getting a hand across his throat. Purkiss, on his back, rolled and brought his knees up so that Pope arced over his head, the momentum carrying him full-tilt into the glass doors.

The crash was colossal, the glass showering down, and this time Ramirez screamed. Pope sprawled halfway through the ruined door, momentarily dazed. Purkiss clambered to his feet and groped at his waistband for the Glock, but the impact of the railing against his foot had hurt more than he’d realised and he staggered on that leg.

Pope was up again and diving for Purkiss, his head butting into Purkiss’s face before Purkiss could bring his hands up. White flashes erupted in Purkiss’s vision and he felt the blood gout from his nose. He stabbed blindly with a half fist and felt Pope’s breath gasp against his ear. Dimly Purkiss realised he’d dropped the Glock, but there was no time to worry about that now. He punched again, and a third time, his fists connecting with the springiness of ribcage. Pope pressed against him the way exhausted prizefighters did. Purkiss got a hand up and aimed a hook at the side of Pope’s head. He felt it glance off solid bone. Pope stumbled backwards towards the shattered door.

‘Stop.’

They faced one another across the breadth of the balcony, a distance of perhaps twenty feet. Pope leant forward, gulping, trying to drag in air. Purkiss clenched his teeth against the nausea he felt, the blurring of his vision.

The voice had been Ramirez’s.

Purkiss glanced to the right, even the eye movement sending his head reeling again. She was pressed against the full-length wall separating the balcony from the one next door.

In her hands, pointed at Purkiss’s chest, she held the Glock.

*

‘Please.’

Purkiss took the first sideways step towards her, extending his right arm to reduce the gap further.

Her eyes were white and wide. She lifted the gun jerkily, finding its weight unexpected, as was the case with most people who held a gun for the first time.

He was fifteen feet from her, Purkiss estimated.

In front of him Pope was beginning to breathe less raggedly, to straighten up. Purkiss saw his hand move inside his jacket.

‘No.’ The woman swung the gun across, again jerkily. Pope stopped moving but kept his hand in his jacket.

‘Nina,’ he said.

‘Take your hand away. Don’t take your gun out.’

Pope lowered his hand. He said, ‘Nina. Thank you.’

‘Don’t speak.’ Her eyes darted from Pope to Purkiss.

Purkiss edged another step closer. Once more she brought the gun across. Pope’s arm moved and she swung the gun back yet again to cover him.

‘Nina.’ Purkiss was closer and could afford to speak more quietly. ‘He’s going to let you die. He’s going to blow up the building opposite and it’s going to collapse. You’ll die, and so will lots of other innocent people. They haven’t finished evacuating yet.’

‘You know that’s not true.’ Pope’s voice too was calm. ‘You’ve trusted me. And I’ve shown that I deserve that trust.’

Ten feet between Purkiss and Ramirez now. The next time Pope goes for his gun, Purkiss thought. That’s when I move.

‘Step back,’ she said to Purkiss, the gun still aimed in Pope’s direction.

‘Nina — ’

‘Back.’

Purkiss watched her lips moving even after she’d said the word. Her eyes flicked up and to the side, as though she was listening.

‘Go away,’ she said, glancing to her left.

‘Nina,’ said Pope. ‘Shoot him.’

Pope’s arm moved.

Purkiss hurled himself at Ramirez, his hand grasping for her wrist.

She stepped back, brought the gun across to bear on him, and fired.

Forty-Eight

‘She’s confused.’

The snide man’s voice.

‘She doesn’t know why Daddy warned her.’

The hateful, hateful woman’s.

‘Did he want to protect her from the man from above?’

‘Or did he want her to get out the way so the man could kill Pope?’

‘She doesn’t know if any of them are on her side.’

‘She thinks they might all be against her.’

The gun was cold and huge and heavy in her grip. She needed both hands even to raise it to shoulder height. She’d had to let go of the violin, which was propped against the wall beside her.

Both men were hurt. Over to the right, Pope was breathing with difficulty. His hair and his face and hands were speckled and streaked with blood from the tiny cuts he’d suffered going through the glass door.

In front of her along the balcony wall, the other man, the tall one with dark hair — yes, the one from the gas station earlier, who’d tried to take her away — had a broken nose and blood all over his face and front.

Nina was aware of the men saying things to her, their voices overlapping; and of herself replying, though she didn’t know what her words meant.

‘She’s wondering if she should shoot them both.’

‘She doesn’t think she can shoot either of them.’

‘How could she ever use a gun?’

‘She must be mad.’

Laughter from both.

‘Which one will she choose?’

‘Pope or the other?’

‘The other or Pope?’

‘Pope will take her away and free her.’

‘The other man’s working for Daddy.’

‘She needs to decide.’

‘Pope’s going for his gun.’

‘The other man’s going for her.’

The gun roared and bucked in her hands, flinging itself upwards and driving backwards painfully against her palm like a horse being broken in. The shock of the noise and the force from the gun sent her staggering back against the hard stone wall.

The dark-haired man dropped.

*

Later the scene would play itself out again and again in her memory:

The dark-haired man sprawling prone at her feet.

Pope coming forward, his own gun emerging from his jacket.

The dark-haired man grabbing the violin case by her legs and swivelling and bringing it up.

The flash from Pope’s gun followed by the blast, and the jerking of the violin case.

The dark-haired man rising to his feet and meeting Pope and swinging the violin down and across and down again, wood splintering and the strings shrieking their agony.

*

No, she thought, falling to her knees on the hard surface.

Forty-Nine

Purkiss flung the wrecked instrument to one side, the contents of the leather case flopping about like broken bones within an outer skin.

Pope faced him, clutching his upper arm. Purkiss thought it was probably broken. Pope’s gun lay six feet away where it had spun after the blows from the violin had knocked it free.

With his good hand Pope reached inside his jacket once more, wincing. He held up a phone.

‘Back off.’

The link to the detonator.

Purkiss stepped back. Behind him and off to one side, Ramirez crouched, rocking. She’d dropped the Glock.

Purkiss’s own phone buzzed. Keeping his eyes on Pope, who was backing round and sideways towards the balcony wall, he fished out the handset. Risked a quick glance at it.

He put it away.

At the wall, Pope squatted and picked up the phone he’d been holding when Purkiss had dropped on him from above, wielding it awkwardly in the same hand as the other phone. He thumbed it and spoke into it.

‘Giordano? It’s time.’

Pope turned his back on Purkiss for the first time, staring across at the Loomis Building. He held the first phone high and pressed.

Pressed again.

He turned back to look at Purkiss. Purkiss shook his head.

The text from Berg had read: You’re right, it was in the truck. Bomb guys have disabled it. What’s going on up there?

Pope dropped both phones.

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s finish this.’

*

Pope moved with the speed and ferocity of the terminally wounded animal with nothing to lose.

His right arm was useless so he used his legs, spinning towards Purkiss with a reverse kick that would have broken Purkiss’s neck if he hadn’t been ready for it. Purkiss ducked forward into the blow, blocking the kick with his forearm and wrapping the arm under Pope’s raised leg and running him forward so that he lost his balance and crashed back against the glass panels that formed the top half of the outer balcony wall.

The panels gave way, slowing Pope’s momentum so that he didn’t pass straight through them but was caught on the edge, slumped across the low wall, half hanging out over the drop below. Purkiss followed him, grabbing his ankles and heaving him further over the rim. Pope’s good hand grappled at the top of the wall and caught it as he swung over.

Purkiss leaned over the rail. Pope hung by one hand from the wall, his feet scrabbling at the sheer wall below the balcony. The street loomed and spun, nineteen floors below. Police cars were massed there, uniforms pressed against them like barnacles.

Purkiss looked at Pope’s upturned face. He didn’t register the expression there.

Instead, he saw the terrified face of the girl, Nina. He saw Nakamura, the FBI man.

He saw Abby, his friend, whom he’d let down.

He saw a man last seen on a boat in the Baltic, a man who’d just told him the truth about his fiancée Claire’s death, and life. A man Purkiss had allowed to live, but shouldn’t have.

Purkiss propped his foot on the wall and ground his boot against Pope’s fingers in a twisting motion.

Pope released his grip, and dropped in silence.

*

‘We have to go now.’

He’d given her five minutes. The police would be on their way up and he’d wanted to spare her the chaos of their arrival.

She’d tried to go over to the rail and look down. Gently but firmly he’d held her back, but when he realised how insistent she was he let her go. There wouldn’t be much to see by now, anyway; the body would have been covered.

He stood by her at the rail, close but not touching, and repeated himself: ‘Nina. We need to go.’

When she again didn’t respond, Purkiss said, ‘Thank you. I know you missed me on purpose.’

She raised her face to him. Her eyes were bright with wonder.

‘When you fired the gun.’ The range had been too close for even an amateur to miss, unless they did so deliberately. The bullet had ricocheted off the wall behind him.

Still staring at him, she whispered: ‘Why?’

His phone sounded and he raised a hand, stepped away. It was Berg.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes. What’s happening?’

‘I’ve got Giordano. He came quietly, and it wasn’t the sight of Kendrick that scared him. The son of a bitch was just waiting there for us.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Yeah. I’ll either get a commendation or go to jail. Maybe both. You coming down?’

‘In a moment.’

‘I’ve given the cops your description so they don’t shoot you. The girl okay?’

‘Yes.’ Physically, anyway. ‘Berg, thanks.’

‘Yeah.’

He put the phone away. Nina was still watching him.

‘You asked why,’ he said. ‘Why did this happen? Pope let his need for revenge take over his personality. He let it blot out all else, including his humanity.’

This time he took her by the arm and drew her away. He didn’t look at her face, because he was aware he hadn’t answered her question. That by why, she’d been asking something else.

Fifty

London

Tuesday 28 May, 2.00 pm

‘The supreme irony,’ said Vale, ‘is that he’s done us a favour.’

They were walking the steep slope of Greenwich Park, the Royal Observatory on the skyline ahead. The day was mild, the lunchtime crowds out enjoying the sun.

It was their final debriefing. The formal meetings had taken place in assorted offices across the capital — none of them Vale’s; Purkiss didn’t know if the man had one — and the paperwork had been taken care of. One last meeting of minds, always outdoors somewhere, and then Purkiss wouldn’t see or hear from Vale until the next operation.

‘Pope’s uncovered one of the most extensive and indefensible black ops cells within the CIA, and eliminated several of the rotten apples into the bargain,’ Vale said. ‘Of course, you and the FBI agent exposed it, ultimately. But none of it would have come to light if not for Pope’s involvement.’

‘How widespread’s the rot?’ asked Purkiss, stepping away from Vale who was pausing to light up.

‘Giordano’s the most senior figure, of course. The most senior one in the Company, that is. Obviously it’s out of our hands now, and I’ve no knowledge of what more they’ve unearthed. But it’s rumoured that even more high-profile figures might have known about Caliban. Congressmen, perhaps.’ He took a deep drag. ‘As for the numbers involved, Giordano was running at least twelve agents that we know of. That figure includes the ones who jumped you in Hamburg — we presume he sent them after you because you’d been seen leaving or entering Jablonsky’s flat and Giordano suspected you of the killing — as well as the ones you encountered in the US. There are likely to be more of them.’

A young family wandered close and Vale fell silent until they’d passed.

‘Your involvement in all of this, and even Pope’s, is going to be kept under wraps, of course. The Cousins are more than willing to overlook the fact that Service personnel have been operating on their turf and even killing American citizens, as long as they can avoid the embarrassment of admitting publicly that a rogue element within their ranks has been conducting illegal medical experiments. So. As I said, Pope’s done us a favour. We’re in the Company’s good books for uncovering Giordano’s wrongdoing. They’ve been relieved of a problem they didn’t even know existed until all this blew up. The FBI have scored points by both taking Giordano into custody and averting a serious terrorist attack.’

‘Bouquets all round,’ said Purkiss.

Vale turned to face him. ‘I didn’t mean to be flippant, John. It’s a mess, of course, and all this politicking is a way of hiding the mess by walling it up and plastering over it. Innocent people are dead. A blameless FBI agent lost his life. A whole city was traumatised by a threat that will have torn the scab off a wound that still hadn’t healed properly. Pope caused lasting damage. Just not quite in the way he intended.’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘He did.’

After a pause to fish out another cigarette and fire it up, Vale said, ‘I checked on the young woman. As no doubt you have.’

Purkiss had long ago concluded there was no point trying to keep secrets from Vale. It was as though he could read minds.

Vale went on: ‘She’s found a temporary home, with the help of social services over there. Somewhere back in her native Virginia. And she’s getting psychiatric assistance.’

Purkiss said nothing.

‘Her health insurance was scanty. I was going to see if I could put together some funds from my budget to help,’ said Vale. ‘But then I learned an anonymous benefactor had got there ahead of me. I wonder who that might have been.’

‘No idea,’ said Purkiss.

*

They reached the Observatory and began to walk around its base.

Purkiss said, ‘It just proves the point I’m always making. You never solve a mystery involving human beings by trying to fathom their motives. Nobody can ever work out why anybody does anything, and it’s a waste of time trying to. Pope concocted this elaborate plan over a decade or more. We don’t know quite how he found out about his father’s connection with Caliban, or the identities of the people involved, but still. He was prepared to murder and kidnap and commit mass terrorism to avenge his father’s death. Yet from our knowledge of him, he hated his father, despised what he did and what he stood for.’

‘Perhaps he did,’ said Vale. ‘Or perhaps his motive wasn’t simply revenge. Perhaps, by finishing the work his father started, by honouring his memory, he was looking for redemption. A very different thing.’

‘Is it so different?’ said Purkiss.

‘I don’t know, John,’ said Vale. ‘Only you can answer yourself that question.’

As if sensing that their meeting had come to a natural end, Vale turned and began walking away down the hill, leaving Purkiss to his thoughts, and memories.

Content

Tim Stevens
Delivering Caliban

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